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Microsoft to Continue Office on Mac
LiMikeTnux wrote to mention a CNN article giving details about the five year agreement now in place between Microsoft and Apple to keep Office alive on the Mac platform. From the article: "Though Apple clearly benefits from having the widely-used Office software available to its users, it may seem less obvious what Microsoft stands to gain from continuing its relationship. But according to Greg DeMichillie, a senior analyst with Directions on Microsoft, an independent consulting and analysis firm focusing specifically on Microsoft, the business is still a profitable one for Microsoft. While it's not a huge part of Microsoft's business, given the company's sheer scale, 'Apple's 3 to 4 percent market share doesn't hurt them either,' DeMichillie said. 'Also, to have them be seen going out of their way to hurt a competing operating system is not really helpful from an anti-trust perspective.'"
Ok, so it's true that they're allowing people to use Apple laptops and computers while still receiving the benefit of Microsoft's Office Suite. But let's consider that the average Apple user just plain doesn't like Windows. Sure, there's some people running both Windows and OSX in their homes right now but I'm guessing that's pretty rare. I would say these users are about as polarized as the last U.S. presidential election.
So Microsoft is still charging a lot of money for this software so it's not like they're taking a profit hit or just handing this out.
On top of that, they may be quashing any possibility of an Apple user being forced to seek alternatives. What I mean is that, without this alternative, Microsoft Office fans (who are also Apple operating system advocates) would be forced to look for an alternative. Maybe even a free open source alternative such as OpenOffice.org or selecting other free word editors?
I see this as a smart move for Microsoft in that it allows them to still maintain a dominant control on these people for publishing suites even though they might have lost them on the operating system level.
Furthermore, I don't think it's fair to compare Office on the Mac with Explorer on the Mac. There are a large amount of benefits that Microsoft Explorer gains from staying on top as the number one used browser. One of them being that Microsoft gains more clout in determining standards for webpages and the communications through the internet.
Now, back to the original article, who the hell is Directions on Microsoft? And, more importantly, what do they have to gain from authoring and publishing Microsoft's Top 10 Challenges for 2006?
If you check out their About Us page, they seem to paint themselves as a resource in understanding the greatness that is Microsoft. I know this is just speculation but I smell Microsoft cooking up a website devoted to thrusting themselves even further into the limelight (since 1992). If this site was a little less biased, I'd be inclined to enjoy it.
My work here is dung.
Yet Windows Media Player and MSIE will no longer be offered... interesting... The MS representative at Macworld was trying to show that they are "in for the long haul" but they're backing out at the same time. Doesn't matter much to me, I hate WMP, MSIE and Office 2004. I wish they would leave Apple alone altogether then maybe apple would release the rest of their iWork suite (that I'm sure is finished but waiting to release until MS pulls out).
Microsoft's announcement explains why we haven't seen the rumored "Numbers" spreadsheet app added iWork yet. It's being worked on for sure - we know Apple is happy to keep teams working on "just in case" projects, like they way they've had an OS X on Intel team working for the last 5 years. So part of the deal is probably that Apple keeps Numbers on the backburner for now, but having it ready to go probably helps Apple negotiate. And for now, having office available on the Mac is better for everyone.
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Of course, I think the most important aspect of this deal is that if Microsoft stops making office software for the Mac, then even the most Windows hardened of the IT guys is gonna have to learn about the alternatives available. Macs are deployed in a great many IT environments (cuz the Graphics people love em, for one thing), alongside a 95% windows operation. If there's no Mac Office, then Office Documents can no longer be a perfect "standard", like most of the IT guys consider them now. Suddenly, compatability will be a concern for even the most timid Windows-junkie Administrator, and Microsoft would soon be facing an even greater pressure to provide some semblance of interoperability. I think this move is much more about protecting Office as a "standard" than it is about the profit (which is probably not a great amount when weighed against Apple's competition in the Desktop OS market).
People who treat technology like sports teams or political parties need to find some other way to define their identity.
Many large organizations (say, with tens of thousands of desktops) are cross-platform, e.g. with mostly PCs running Microsoft Windows with a few Apple macintosh systems scattered around for graphic design.
They use Microsoft Office everywhere because then all their users can edit documents.
Of course, all here doesn't always include Unix users, and those people sometimes have two desktop computers.
If Microsoft were to drop support for the Mac, a lot of large organizations would consider switching to OpenOffice (or StarOffice, or some other solution).
When I worked at a software company that made SGML software some 10 years ago, we could sell 30,000 desktop licences to someone only because 300 of those would be able to run on the Macintosh (the others were HP/UX and Windows). They required cross-platform support on everything.
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The only thing keeping Entourage from being better than Outlook by leaps and bounds is MS's intentional crippling of Entourage as an Exchange client.
I'm not a tinfoil hat type, but I too feel that Entourage's Exchange abilities are intentionally subpar to keep the Mac at bay in corporate environments. There's no other explanation for why they couldn't just implement MAPI and instead went with some sort of DAV/IMAP abomination to retrieve mail. It's also taken them much too long to even implement all of Outlook 2001's features, which themselves are just a subset of those on Outlook for Windows. It is indeed very suspicious when you step back and look at how superior Mac Office is in nearly every other way.
I still keep my clients on Outlook 2001 wherever possible, which unfortunately will cease to be an option on Intel-based Macs since the Classic environment won't work on those.
If you don't like Entourage's Exchange implementation, complain. I know it's unlikely they'll actually listen to us and redo it right, but it can't hurt to try.
~Philly
Oh dear. Only a slashdotter could think having a computer would impress a chick. You don't talk much to women, do you?
I myself have to be reminded of this point now and then, so perhaps it's worth mentioning:
One of the most longtime supporters of Apple, and one of the most loyal (and by loyal I mean "did not bail when Apple's star was dimming at various times in the past") is, oddly, Microsoft. They have quietly kept a large selection of their products supported on the Macs over the years, even when other software companies were ditching Apple for the growing green pasturues of the Windows world.
Now, I can already hear guns being cocked, so let me be clear as to how I intend all this: we should not percieve announcements such as being discussed above as being some new drive for MS. Instead, it is actually, pretty much, more of the same type of thing they have been doing for a very long time. As for their reasons, plans, or evil coniving - couldn't tell ya, and that isn't the point of what I mention. But Microsoft, for decades, has made many of it's bits of software available on Apple computers (perhaps the plural on decade is a bit of a stretch, but you get what I mean.)
There's another reason for continuing to produce Mac versions of Office, which is that this market usually pays full retail. In the Windows/Linux world, it either comes preinstalled, or you steal it, which is to say, borrow it from your pals or at work. Since it is so ubiquitous, it's easy to find copies. When Linux was my sole desktop, I always had "borrowed" copies of office running on crossover office, for when openoffice.org compatibility wasn't good enough, or when I had to look at some access database. I don't have it on my Mac laptop, because I would have to pay handsomely for it.
Office 2004 for OS X is light years better than Office 2003 for Windows.
Ridiclous -- the featuresets between the two suites have diverged. While the Mac version has some consumer and student-oriented features not found in the Windows version, there's a TON of corporate/groupware stuff that's not in the Mac version.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Since the table feature in iWork '06 is not called Numbers, it clearly isn't the product for which Apple trademarked the name 'Numbers'.
I wouldn't be a bit surprised to learn that Apple has a professional-quality office suite in the box labelled 'In Case of Emergency', right next to the spot where OS X for Intel used to be. And if that's true, I would be even less surprised to learn that MS agreed to continue Office for Mac on the condition that Apple not release its office suite.
It makes a cutthroat kind of sense. After all, Apple could release its office suite for Windows and pose a direct threat to MS on their own turf, something that has never happened before. But it would take a huge effort to sell such a product, and the result might only be a price war that would destroy all profitability in office software. In other words, it's a sabre for Apple to rattle. And a sabre is usually a much more effective weapon by being rattled in the scabbard than by being drawn in combat.