On 1/27/2003, Lewis Nelson wrote: >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.
Actually, the problem is that most university IT/computer support depts. do NOT support the Mac, even if there are Macs (in the case of the university in my city, the Macs are in the Art department and the Mass Communications departments, primarily). Just try to find support for the Mac from anyone outside those department... Chris hit the nail on the head - I'd bet that it's not the wonderful support of Micro$oft that has got the Mac in the door at companies and universities (other than, again as Chris mentioned, niche areas such as the creative ones). It's been in SPITE of Microsoft that Macs are where they are. I think the main reason Apple has been supporting M$ Office in recent years has been that their agreement with M$ hasn't expired. Since it either expired or is about to really soon, you are seeing Apple come out with some products that (quite well) stand up to M$ products: Safari v. Exploder, Keynote v. PowerPoint, and who knows might be around the corner. I agree with what Chris said that with OS X's *nix (more stable) base, plus the Internet, there is less loyalty that automatically goes with Micro$oft products, since there are more and more decent alternatives out there. Look at the bugs in M$ servers which last weekend's virus took advantage of (and that was six months after M$ admitted to the security gaps). The only M$ products I have on my system are Explorer (which gets used only about once every 2-3 months on poorly written sites whose code demands that MIE be used), PowerPoint (for the 2 or 3 PP presentations that I rarely need to view), and Outlook Express (which I only use about every 4-6 months when I want to see an email that my usual email client doesn't render accurately). Most of the time I am using iCab or Mozilla (Netscape for my bank because iCab isn't recognized), AppleWorks (with import/export to/from any Word format files), GraphicConverter (which handily converts any M$ image I've needed to pull up), and Claris Emailer (and sometimes iCab if a friend sends me HTML mail). I see little or no need to have Micro$oft products. Back when Word 6 came out, I tried it out on my Mac and was introduced to bloatware - took forever to get it to start up. Took it right back off and decided I didn't need to buy it and didn't even want it for free(!). When I get email from friends about another Wintel virus, I am quite glad to be running a Mac system without the worries of that. Once I switch to Jaguar (after my HD and RAM upgrades for my Pismo), I expect to still find that 99 percent of what I need to do can be done quite well with Apple and third party (i.e., non-M$) programs. Thank Heaven for Adobe, Apple, and shareware developers! Jim Rohde "It's the Macintosh - it's _supposed_ to be easy!" - The Macintosh Bible (early edition). ___________________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe send a mail message with a SUBJECT line of "unsubscribe" to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> or <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
