>You must live on another planet. At a Pac-10 university here, I know that >most of the Macs there would not be there if were not for MS Office for >the Mac. Very, very few of the users would make the effort to find other >alternatives. Most really like their Macs but would not get support for >using anything but Office as about all of the Windows computers their use >it.
I'd be curious, outside of university provided machines (where the decision is made by someone who usually isn't as knowledgable as they would like to think they are), how many of the macs would still have been bought even if MS office wasn't available for it. And even university provided ones that are in a lab, I would be surprised if many of them weren't also purchased despite a lack of MS Office. Sure, right now the policy is "we only support Office", and that makes sense... because it is available for both platforms, so why bother supporting anything else. But if it wasn't available for the Mac, I suspect another Mac product would probably wind up on the support list. But I think you would find that most of the personal purchases by people who "really like their Macs", would still have bought one, and just used an MS compatible product. This was a little harder to do in the past (had to use something like MacLink Plus or an app that could deal with Office formats), but not impossible. And under today's current shipping market (where we are really looking, as this whole idea is what will happen tomorrow to the mac market if MS dropped office), MS Office replacements are a peice of cake to come by. (AppleWorks 6 reads and writes Word and Excel files, Keynote does Powerpoint files, ThinkFree Office does all 3, Nisus Writer does Word, MacLink Plus does everything and then some, StarOffice IIRC will do Word and Excel, icWord and icExcel do Word and Excel... and those are just off the top of my head without doing any attempt at looking for a solution). Unless of course, you are talking about one of the Intel Kiss Ass schools that had their higher ups woo'd by Intel via a ton of payoffs, and in return issued letters to all incoming freshman that they are advised not to purchase anything but WinTel systems. With those schools, all bets are off on what will be purchased and supported, because their decisions aren't rooted in logic or even cost savings, but simply in who bought a Dean his new BMW. -chris <http://www.mythtech.net> ___________________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe send a mail message with a SUBJECT line of "unsubscribe" to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> or <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
