On Tue, 7 Jan 2003, Allan Atherton wrote: > Jerry Yeager <jerry at browseryshop.com> wrote: > > 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?
In the big corporate environment, I'll stay quiet in favour of Jerry's reply on Palladium. In the smaller corporate environment, the installation systme of XP has made casual duplication of 1 CD -> Many computers a lot harder. As a small company, buying lots of windows licenses, plus a windows server license, plus an exchange license etc, is all quite scary when you compare it to an 80 dollar Linux CD. > 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. Agreed. The constant rumour that Office will move to an XML format would kill this [and is maybe the kind of thing the monopoly judges should be forcing], otherwise, it'll be a pain. Abiword and Gnumeric still impress me and I'll be looking forward to using them under the new OS X X11. > 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'm pretty sure Lotus Notes runs on OS X. Notes blows Exchange aware as a groupware/communications product, and Exchange's email capabilities are laughable. Any of the open-source email servers defeat it. > 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. AppleWorks has never impressed me. Maybe just because it has the name clash with MicrosoftWorks. I equate it with a shoddy version of an Office suite. Competing with MS though is where Apple gets to make its name. It has to balance the edge between Mac compatibility and Mac differentiation. ie) I applaud the Safari web-browser [except the name], but it has to be able to be a complete IE beater as IE is the standard. This will be tricky. MS have no monopoly here though, even with the dominance of IE [dropping now], they are still held to an open-standard. On the other hand, any competition on the Office front would be great. MS have a closed-standards monopoly here. This means that MS have been able to milk people for what is a simple concept, a word-processor for ages. While large companies may need the complex word documents you describe, the average company should be able to get the basic features of Word for free. Word Processors are not rocket science, they're ages old technology. Hen | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be January 28. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>.
