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.'"

Comments

While this is slightly off-topic...

[ellem]

Office 2004 for OS X is light years better than Office 2003 for Windows.

Tons of the features in 2004 are showing up in other products for MS, like OneNote, Project etc. 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.

Perhaps MS uses OS X for advanced products beta testing?

Re:I Can See Gains for MS with This Move

[Radical Rad]

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?

If Microsoft were to drop MS Office on the Mac then they would be opening up about 4% of the OS market to the alternatives you mentioned. That is something they don't need right now because even their grip on the Windows Office market is loosening. How many hundreds of thousands of licenses have they lost worldwide to Star Office or Open Office. They aren't doing Apple any favors here. They are just trying to prolong their time on top.

Entourage not a compatible Exchange client

[Anonymous Coward]

Too many features have been intentionally not supported by Microsoft where Entourage is concerned. Distribution lists cannot be used on Entourage unless created locally (forget about someone sending this to you from a Windows box). According to MS the work around for everything is webmail.

Why bother using Entourage at all when only basic functions are supported.

Where is Visio, Publisher for Mac? These sort of things encourage people to switch to Windows. Could be the motivation?

In short, MS does not fully support Office for Mac currently, why does this 5 year agreement mean anything?

Originally...

[pvt_medic]

this agreement was speculated to be part of a settlement between microsoft and apple. Aplle had microsoft on a patent violation and they made a settlement out of court and quite secretively. This initial agreement was speculated to be part of the agreement,.

More like 1/2 of office

[nurb432]

While its nice to have word and excel, there are a few things missing like access, viiso, project. Just enough missing components to still need to run a windows desktop in most companies.

More like a 'teaser' than real support.

Re:More like 1/2 of office

[arachnoprobe]

You can import&export MS Viso Files with Omnigraffle Pro (by http://www.omnigroup.com/), which is even better than that. MS Project is AFAIK accesible by Merlin (by http://www.projectwizards.net/en/merlin/). Only Access is missing, where I tend to agree, that causes major headaches - for linux migrations, too. But since most Access-"databases" are so bad, they should be replaced anyway.

WOW

[Anonymous Coward]

It's commonly known that Office 13 (or whatever it'll be called) will have CLR support rather than just the old ~VB6 scripting. That's great as we'll be able to code with C#, IronPython, etc in Excel!

Office 13 will probably be released in 2008/9 - so should be within this 5 year contract. Does this mean that MS wil be porting .NET to OS X?

Re:I Can See Gains for MS with This Move

[SpeedyBandito]

I think you're assuming people first buy their mac, then look around and say "Now what can I use to get work done?"

Whenever I'm talking to someone about switching to a Mac, one of their first questions is "But I have to open Word files for my job, so won't I need Windows?" Thanks to Microsoft, this is one more thing switchers don't have to worry about.

I agree with most of your other points though.

Office is just as important as Windows to MS...

[Deviant]

Office is just as important to MS, if not more so, than Windows is. Buisinesses might have Linux webservers or Oracle database servers but they all use Microsoft Office with very few exceptions. It is the software that actually gets the real work done, and the document formats that everybody writes that work to exchange them in, and it is a larger and more important monopoly for them in the long term.

Now Microsoft has a dilemma - do they ensure the survival of Office by making it availible on platforms like Linux to ensure it can run on every desktop or do they force you to stay on their platform by making that the only way to run it? So far they have choen to not lend legitimacy to Linux as a desktop platform and it has not hurt them very much. However, OSX is a much more appealing desktop, one that is gaining in popularity, and Microsoft chose to support it to keep the people who chose it using Office.

I think that the current balance that MS is striking between supporting their platform and supporting Office also the Mac as a second platform is working for them and to their benefit. The last thing they want is for all the Mac users to turn to another office platform - especially one that has a windows version and/or is less expensive - that they could evangelicly convert their friends and family to. People stay with Office because it is the easy and safe choice and it actually is a good product that does most of what they want and need. The most important thing that Office has, though, is it's ubiquity - and so far they have managed to be able to keep that and it is well worth what they pay to port Office to the Mac.

I think that if Linux gains enough popularity where it is 10-15% of worldwide desktops in countries that can afford Office you'll see them port it to that too...

History can repeat, Vista for Macs

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep in mind that Office dominates the Windows market because Microsoft was bold enough to develop it for the new Mac platform at a time when WordPerfect and 123 dominated the PC market. Only after Word and Excel were a success on Macs did they move to PCs.

History could repeat itself. If Microsoft abandons the Mac, the product that replaces it might be good enough to establish a beachhead there and eventually challenge Office for Windows, one of Microsoft's biggest cash cows. In that context, keeping the profitable Mac Business Unit going is free insurance.

Now if Microsoft would just set up a group within the Mac-loving Mac BU to develop and maintain a version of Vista for the Mac. It makes perfect sense. The copies of Vista they sell would almost pure profit and, given the small size of the Mac product line, they're likely to be the most stable version of Vista on the market.

I know an InDesign instructor who'd be absolutely delighted. He could buy easily transported Intel iMacs and use them to teach InDesign for both OS X and Windows. And I'd get it to maintain the books I have in FrameMaker. Whether you like or hate Microsoft, Vista for Intel Macs would be a win-win situation for everyone.

--Mike Perry, Untangling Tolkien

Re:History can repeat, Vista for Macs

[GeffDE]

With the new Intel Macs, there would be no need for a Mac version of Vista. You would be able to dual-boot Vista on that iMac, and quite probably, eventually be able to open up Vista in a window on an OS X desktop a la a VMWare-type solution.

Still no obvious reason to commit to 5 years

[RetiredMidn]

OK, TFA and several posters here have provided reasons for why Microsoft would continue to produce Office for the Mac, such as "they make a profit on it". But nobody has really offered a reason as to why they would commit, in writing, to producing it for any length of time.

The only explanation that I can see is that they got some sort of concession out of Apple in exchange for the commitment.

I suspect that the concession from Apple was to not actively support OpenOffice. Maybe they offered in exchange for help (that I don't think they need) to get VirtualPC working on the new Intel Macs. But I'd welcome more informed speculation.

About $500 per copy sold

[rssrss]

"it may seem less obvious what Microsoft stands to gain from continuing its relationship."

About $500 per copy sold

Re:Cross-platform documents

[Ankh]

Wintel has been just as good for graphics design for years from a speed perspective...

It's not about performance (although you can certainly find Macintosh enthusiasts who will say otherwise). In the past it has been that Apple provided the necessary infrastructure for things like automatic central font management, image replacement and asset management, monitor and printer colour calibration and correction, 72dpi screens, and of course for a long time there were typesetters (high-resolution printers, if you like) that crashed if you sent TrueType fonts to them...

These days, yes, you can use a PC running Microsoft Windows and do pretty much everything, although because Apple is so entrenched in the graphic design community you may still find programs that are Mac-only. Things like various pre-flight checkers to make sure you've packaged everything up correctly to send to the printing house, including the right under-colour removal, trapping, and maximum ink density, and will warn you if you've chosen colours that won't reproduce or might make the press have problems. And then there are graphic design magazines from Applied Arts here in Canada to Print or Communication Arts that review new Mac hardware and addons and have columns with tips for Mac users...

So it's not entirely an empty prejudice that Macs are more likely to be used in graphic design, just as it's not entirely an empty prejudice that Unix (including Linux, Solaris, etc.) is more likely to be used on a Web server than Microsoft Windows. The prejudice, I think, is to assume it's only about performance :-)

At any rate, when I made the comment I was trying to describe what I have seen.

Best,

Liam

the Safari effect

[BlueStraggler]

Microsoft's problem is that Apple could fairly easily make a smoking, open, cross-platform office suite just by taking OOo and giving it a hot little Aqua outfit and applying some of that Apple secret sauce, just like they did with KHTML and Safari. In fact, I wouldn't be surpised if they've already done that as a back-up plan, just like their Intel port of OS X. If such a critter was ever released, it would probably just be bundled with the OS for free, since it's free software to start with. A quiet little demo of this project with the Microsoft rep would be all that it takes to ensure that MS keeps supporting Office-Mac until the end of time.

Re:I Can See Gains for MS with This Move

[MikeFM]

If Apple were to push OpenOffice or any other suite that supported Open Document Format it'd create a real alternative to the Windows/Office pair. So long as Mac users stay in the MS Office camp it keeps Apple from adding strength to a dangerous rival. I think if anything Apple is foolish to agree. They'd be better off to create a real alternative. OS X has enough support that throwing their weight behind ODF and their own office suite would be unlikely to hurt them much in the short-term (since they could still read/write MS files) and could have major long-term benefits.