On Sunday, December 26, 2004, at 11:01 AM, David Lesher wrote:
What I don't grasp is Apple's seeming indifference to the clear alterative: Open Office.
I use OO on other platforms, and where I must use a Word-ish product; it's the clear choice. [I prefer WordPerfect, and use it more, but > that
is a side issue..]
The major trouble with OO on OSX is it does not run under Aqua, requiring X11. That means a jolting exception in areas such as key assigments, a hassle starting it, eyc.
See NeoOffice <http://www.neooffice.org/> ;-) just released in beta form, it's OO 1.1.3 ported to Mac-nativeness. I recommend it.
I can't see why Apple is not providing the OO folks the resources they need to get a native OO port going now, not in a few years.
Because they may not wish to compete head-on with Microsoft just yet? How did that ol' Jim Croce song go? "You don't tug on Superman's cape, you don't spit into the wind..." :-/
An Apple-branded OO suite would be seen as a direct threat to MS Office, and give OO a lot more credibility than it does right now.
If MS drops Mac Office, it would severely hurt Apple's chances (slim as they are now) in the corporate and government arena. Hell, no MS Office would kill the Mac just about everywhere, due to the myopia and abject subjugation of the IT world by MS, and both Apple and Microsoft know this. You're not going to see a dime of Apple support go to OO.
Microsoft has Apple over, what is it? Yeah, a barrel...
Keynote isn't a threat because no one, NO ONE buys just Powerpoint. Office is the program...MS knows they have a lock on the market, and that is a huge club to hold over Apple's head.
Enough changes were introduced in Office 2003 that OS X Office 2001 wasn't completely compatible...we get sent PP files of professor's lectures to convert to PDF and put up for our students; I got several this year that didn't properly convert (fonts all wrong, in the wrong places, elements were missing, etc) so I had to go find a PC with Office 2003 on it to convert them properly.
To be fair, MS did the same thing to all of their Office 2002 users on the PC too, part of their "you're merely paying rent on this stuff" forced upgrade treadmill. I gotta get Office 2004 just for this crap.
(Oddly enough, though, it's only the PC using faculty that make us do the conversions...every one of the Mac using profs are quite conversant with making PDF files, setting them up the way they want, etc...they even listen to use and tell us what folders they're in on the servers, so we can just copy them to the web server rather than email us these giant 25 and 30 meg attached PP files.
Yes Virginia, Mac users ARE more intelligent...)
But MS'es over-arching strategy is to keep any and all competition confined to the FUD-o-sphere (look, for example, at their current campaign against Linux) or undercut it out of the market, like they did to Word Perfect.
Microsoft has also had the good fortune of having competitors routinely shoot themselves in the foot with Mac-10's. Witness the decline and fall of Word Perfect.
Sure it's still around, and I'll even bet they have a few percent of the market, but they were once head-to-head competitors with MS Word, like Illustrator versus Freehand. Then came Novell's disastrous run at unseating MS as king of the OS hill. Novell got crushed, WP got sold to Corel which has been the burial grounds for so many useful programs that their stock symbol should be DED, and we all know what's happened since.
Witness what happened with Netscape. They stumbled with NS 3 and IE got a head start it never gave up, not the least of which it was free (though to be frank, I've never met anyone who actually bought Netscape...).
Notice where MS is quiet...SQL server is widely seen in the industry as merely a step up from Access; it's mainly used as an embedded sql engine in other products; Oracle, Sybase, and DB2 are all effective competitors on the higher end.
IIS is used in a lot of places, but influential people are tiring of the continual security hassles of IIS as a web server; pache still has a LOT of installations, and the above competitors: Oracle, Sybase and IBM all use Apache severs as their embedded Web servers. Apache accounts for greater than 50% of all web servers.
MS is losing in the overall back-end server market, too, though they still have the large lead they built up crushing Novell, Linux servers are proliferating in the server closets and once Mozilla's Sunbird scheduling and calendaring project is ready for prime time, that'll be a drop in, free replacement for Exchange. That's dangerous, because a lot of people are warming to Firefox and Thunderbird browsers and mail.
At some point corporate folks are finally going to notice that they're sending wads of cash to MS when they could be keeping a lot by using OSS components.
Then an Apple-branded OO will fly.
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