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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.
Don't forget that if you're a college student or work at a college or university, you can often get a license for Office X very cheaply. The school that I work at offers it for just a few dollars. Check with your college bookstore or computer store before shelling out big bucks.
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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?
This
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).
You are confused. The point of having a Mac is impressing chicks. It's Linux users who desperately need to avoid Microsoft products.
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).
Software companies like to sell software to people with computers.
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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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,.
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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.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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...
Oh dear. Only a slashdotter could think having a computer would impress a chick. You don't talk much to women, do you?
Microsoft doesn't want to lose its most talented developers. Seriously, just compare the mac office to the windows office....its night and day.
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
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.
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.
Disclaimer: I am an OpenOffice.org developer and a NeoOffice founder.
There are a number of tricks with which you may be able to improve presentation performance. First off, try 1.2 Beta. Older versions of NeoOffice/J were based on Java 1.3. Apple's virtual machine was buggy, so to implement drawing properly we needed to use triple buffering. With NeoOffice 1.2, we're using Java 1.4 and can access drawing buffers directly without working around bugs Apple never fixed in earlier VM versions.
Another thing to keep in mind is that you can always improve speed if you avoid transitions and animations in your presentation. Various funky cube wipes/dissolves add nothing to the content of presentations and just waste everyone's time and (I daresay) distract from the actual content. Folks should focus on what a bullet point actually *says*, not whether it flies in from the right, iris dissolves, or whatever. Sorry if it seems like a rant, but animations really are frills and should be used sparingly. In most every presentation using them, the "transition effects" actually detract from the content instead of providing meaningful information.
I've used NeoOffice and OOo X11 for presentations off of a 400MHz TiBook for years at O'Reilly conferences, business conferences, and others. If someone complains that their presentations run slowly, the first thing that runs through my mind is that it's not the type of presentation I want to be sitting through. Give me an overhead projector with transparancies anyday over something with sound effects and transitions that'll trigger seizures :D
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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.