Jerry Yeager <jerry at browseryshop.com> wrote: > Wait until Palladium gets going, then you will be seeing many corporations > leaving Windows for either Linux or Mac desktop systems. ... A serious > AppleWorks upgrade (rather than update) would put Apple in well with the > corporate users who would still be able to use the .doc format for quite some > time. As it is now, AppleWorks can translate (with the help of MacLinkPlus for > OS-X) many of the .doc files.
I used Windows all day long for ten years, in a corporate highly networked environment with nationwide offices, i.e. the Fed govt. And what you are saying does not make sense to me. What is Palladium, and why in the world would corporations want to lose their investment in Windows programs and Office and isolate themselves? After the years of Wordstar and WordPerfect, Word and the other Office programs prevailed and have spread throughout the world to become the lingua franca of business. I don't see why corporations would change their OS, all their software and their hardware. Aside from the incredible cost and sheer difficulty, they would be unable to communicate very well for a long time. They also use a lot of very special software for budgeting and management that is has been written just for them at incredible cost. For documents, translation by MacLinkPlus is no substitute for the true cross platform transparency of Office. Translation requires software, updates, progress bars, and cleaning up formatting that does not always translate so well. The documents that I produced and exchanged in the business world could be a hundred pages long and highly formatted with all kinds of imbedded stuff, taking a huge investment to prepare. One does not mess around with "translations". Translations are not trustworthy. For communications, the usefulness and power and complexity of Microsoft Outlook Exchange is incredible, and I don't think there is anything like it in the Mac world. It goes beyond email. I just don't think the future of Mac lies in pulling away and competing with Office and Microsoft. AppleWorks ... it could go the way of BeagleWorks. Allan Atherton | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be January 28. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>.
