Apple's Rumored Office Suite 863
Several anonymous readers noted that the mac rumor mill is churning already with news for the upcoming MacWorld. The current rumor is a new office suite to replace the incredibly dated AppleWorks and incredibly bloated and slow MS Office.
appleworks (Score:3, Insightful)
I cann't fault it's ability to make a simple hand typed document without bloat, and for that I will continue to use it.
left out one adjective (Score:5, Insightful)
Bloatedly slow? (Score:5, Insightful)
why not do... (Score:5, Insightful)
Makes Sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Beating MS Office != Trivial (Score:5, Insightful)
The only way any product in this space is going to go places is if it works just like Office, acts just like Office, feels just like Office, etc. Office is the standard, and for 99% of people that use it, it's flawless. Any deviation from this standard suite, even if it's an improvement, is nothing but a nuisance to the average user.
A common user seeing one single glitch (glitch defined as something different from how it works in Office) will run (not walk) to their standard MS Office icons.
How do I know this is true? Simple. There are tons of people who are actually into the OSS movement, love Slashdot, run Linux servers, run OS X, etc. that *still* run MS Office when they can run OpenOffice instead? Why is that? It's because even the most open-minded of us are creatures of habit. And if *these* people are resistant, imagine how the masses are.
Great Move (Score:5, Insightful)
If the rumour is true (and Think Secret have been very accurate over the past couple of years) then bundling all this software along with the $500 Mac is a great move for them. 1.25Ghz G4 might not sound like much, but it's faster than the last generation iMac I have, and it's already fast enough for the majority of computer users (those who surf, do email, write some letters and take pictures from their digital cameras). Combined with all the software these users are likely to need, it's a great price.
Re:Oh, Please Let It Be So! (Score:5, Insightful)
It is amazing when its Apple but evil when its Microsoft?
Re:bloated office suite? (Score:5, Insightful)
There are really two classes of users that need ``office'' software.
At the low end, you have most home users and students. Most of this group just needs basic wordprocessing and spreadsheet functionality. The most advanced feature would really need to be spellcheck.
At the high end, you have the business users who use a lot of the advanced features like revision tracking, charting, scheduling, etc.
I'm not really sure one suite can cover both audiences.
Simple (Score:4, Insightful)
When/if they come out with an Aqua-ized version of OO.o, the reason will change to "because Apple believes they can do it better". And I'd give them every chance to try, too.
Word compatible (Score:5, Insightful)
If this iWorks isn't 100%--and I mean 100%--compatible with Office, forget it. And is Apple making the right strategic move, here? One of the reasons that folks even contemplate moving from Windows to OS X, instead of, say, Linux, is that you can buy Microsoft Office for OS X.
If MS feels threatened by iWorks, they'll just kill Office for OS X. And then Apple has lost one of their best marketing reasons to go Mac instead of Linux.
Not that Keynote really caused any problems--but iWord is a different story. Maybe this is just so Apple can have a "professional grade" office suite to put on the their pro line, and if you need Office compatibility (like 95% of the world) you buy Office for the Mac? But it would save that other 5% $500.
I guess I don't see the wisdom of this.
Some Notes (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple's walking a tightrope with Microsoft.
Unless it runs on something OTHER than MacOS (Score:4, Insightful)
Now if the interface is an absolute paradigm shift that is an order of magnitude more efficient than the mah jhong tiles that define the top of applications in GUI's today AND it runs on Linux?
Then watch out.
Otherwise, people will put up with Office because it is what their company buys, and they don't want to learn 2 word processors/spreadsheet/groupware applications. IE: They will not want to use one application for 99% of what they do every day, and the other one for the Holiday Christmas letter.
Re:Open Office? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why build when (Score:5, Insightful)
That OperOffice.org runs under X11 on OS X is enough reason not to use it for 98% of the people out there. It can't even use native menus and widgets, for Pete's sake.
I love that I can run The GIMP and friends through X11 on my Mac, but there's no way in hell I'd call it "perfectly good". X11 on Mac is adequate--enough to get the job done, but little more than that. I'll take native apps over X11 any day of the week.
Re:left out one adjective (Score:1, Insightful)
Cars are expensive, but if they do what you need them to do, they are worth the price.
VideoCards are expensive -- but that doesn't stop geeks from spending $300 on a card that is solely there to play videogames (especially when an entire playstation is only $200).
And bloated? No one ever uses all the features -- but if you need the feature they are there. For instance, as a researcher, I use the revision feature a lot. Makes it easy to see who has done what and when. Nice when you have a doc being sent to half a dozen people. Other features I don't need. But if they weren't there, but if I want interdoc compatibility -- the app better be able to understand them.
Bloat is only a bad thing if you never plan on sharing a document or ar just writting up grocery lists.
M$ Office is one of the few apps I can't live without on my Mac. Maybe this will change with Apple's software, but then again, I like Office for OSX. I hate Windows but love office -- if thats all M$ made, I'd be happy.
Re:Oh, Please Let It Be So! (Score:1, Insightful)
but there is a difference between unfair market dominance and terrible business practices that completely dominate an industry, and a smaller company adding a new product that works well with other things.
Well, why not? (Score:2, Insightful)
I'd love to see Office come from Apple, and I don't even have a Mac (at least not yet). They make good products and solid software, at least in the realm of OS X (can't speak for any other versions of the OS) and I say, why not? But I won't hold my breath over a rumor...
-Jay
Let's not co-opt common names... (Score:5, Insightful)
This brings to mind MS's annoying habit of calling things by generic names (Movie Maker, SQL Server, Word, Internet Explorer, Media Player, etc.). I wish they'd knock it off... it can really screw up a Google search, both for MS and non-MS products. They should stick with names like Excel and Powerpoint, and Apple should not pick up this habit. Call it iWriter or something. Hell, why not OOWriter
Re:Oh, Please Let It Be So! (Score:3, Insightful)
How do you figure?
That may have been the case five years ago, but not now -- the most important applications that runs on a consumer PC today are the web browser and the email client.
Not close to competitive...but could be a start. (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, OO is a fine product in it's Win and Lin incarnations, and I personally would prefer Apple to fully fund a team dedicated to properly porting the darn thing to Aqua, as opposed to rolling their own from scratch. There is a somewhat beleaguered dev trying to do the job, but they need lots of help. Some developers and cash would make their lives a lot easier.
A funded porting team would also benefit from being able to use the work of the OO core team in dealing with the always-vexing "catch up" issues such as managing the MS format changes, in turn letting the port team focus on making the OO updates play nice in Aqua. Less work for them, quicker updates for the user community.
(Not that Steve gives an expresso shot for what I think, but, hey, I can hope... )
Re:Word compatible (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Oh, Please Let It Be So! (Score:3, Insightful)
No. When Apple does it, it works. When Microsoft does it, it satisfies the feature list.
Excel (Score:3, Insightful)
Real Mac fans welcome new Mac users (Score:2, Insightful)
Charges of elitism mostly come from people who never liked the Mac to begin with.
Oh-oh-oh! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Oh, Please Let It Be So! (Score:4, Insightful)
Flashy presentations is a sign of a lack of design sense. That's not a prerequisite to being smart.
Rumor may be from only from development (Score:3, Insightful)
However, I really don't see Apple releasing such a product at the current time, when they really need MS to continue development on OS X Office to attract potential switchers.
I think it is more likely being developed as a contingency plan in case anything happens with MS to cause them to terminate development of OS X Office or sour their relationship with Apple.
We saw this already with the browser situation. Apple promoted IE heavily over Netscape only while their agreement with MS required it. Then when development on OS X Explorer started to languish badly and it was clear that it was no longer a priority for MS, Apple released Safari. It is quite likely that development on it began long before then.
Re:Oh, Please Let It Be So! (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps so. These are philosophical and sociological considerations, and outside the arguments over any relative technical and human-interface merit of the software in question.
As an aside of my own - I often need "flashy' presentations to compensate for the lacking attention span of those with the fat wallets, not the lacking of my content.
Re:Oh, Please Let It Be So! (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Bloatedly slow? (Score:1, Insightful)
I'd be more impressed if it were Cocoa from the ground up, or at least never let you see clear signs of the Carbonized underpinnings - there's no reason in OS X you'd ever see those "Memory low" warning dialogs which our users have occasionally seen in Word v.X .
Of course, AppleWorks is the demo app for the Carbon libs... in any event, more competition and options in the office suite space would probably be a good thing.
Re:Oh, Please Let It Be So! (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep. Because when Apple does it, the end user sees a benefit. When Microsoft does it, their market share increases. There was no logical reason to integrate the entire browser into the OS like it was in Windows 9x. The proper and better way is to embed an API, and put a browser out that works off that, like how OS X (Safari) and 2000/XP do it. Remember how in 98 IE crashes could make the taskbar disappear?
The integration between the iLife apps is a great example of good integration. On the Windows side, Movie Maker ignores Windows Media Player to find music, and the photo stuff in the OS is horrible and can't be turned into a movie slideshow easially.
Re:Beating MS Office != Trivial (Score:3, Insightful)
100% of prison inmates live in prison. The people who don't like Office, aren't using it. Simple.
There are tons of people who are actually into the OSS movement, love Slashdot, run Linux servers, run OS X, etc. that *still* run MS Office when they can run OpenOffice instead?
I don't suppose this could be because OpenOffice isn't quite as good as Office? Nah... can't risk putting a dent in your precious OSS.
I would use MS Office over OpenOffice on OS X because I don't want to run X11, and because despite being from Microsoft, it fits MUCH better into the OS than OO.o does. I use a number of OSS programs, not because they're open source, but because they're better.
Re:Beating MS Office != Trivial (Score:4, Insightful)
Is an office suite the number one thing I use on my laptop? No, it isn't. But it surely is an important component. And I am not actually an office worker per se, I am a mostly-contract coder. But I still have to generate and deal with a significant number of documents in an Office-compatible format for dealing with others. And I can't really imagine many jobs that use a computer at all that aren't the same way.
Re:Who really cares? (Score:3, Insightful)
Until Apple releases a version of Final Cut Pro for Windows (which will NEVER happen), I can so no reason for me to ever purchase a Windows box.
OS X is not a marketing gimmick. It was something that the company simply HAD TO DO in order to create a modern operating system that allowed them to do what was necessary to meet the needs of it's customers. People don't buy Macs because they are antiM$ extremists. People buy Macs because they work well for what is needed of them and, to use their own marketing hype, They Simply Work. I've had my DP 1.8Ghz G5 for about 5 months now and it has never crashed, never received a virus and has basiaclly allowed me to get my work (editing video) done without ever having to worry about the computer itself. I'm enough of a geek to fix just about any problem that might come up, but luckily, I don't have to sweat it. My machine works, period.
Re:Wonder what code base (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, page numbers would be nice, too. And real control over your margins. And footnotes. And mail merge. And maybe headers and footers. Multi-columns would be nice. Okay, so maybe it needs *just* a bit more than tables. But tables would be nice, too.
Re:Oh, Please Let It Be So! (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't say MS's office integration doesn't work, or that it merely ticks a box on some notional feature list.
The level integration and interoperability of the Office suite is something that most other software vendors aspire to, but few (if any) have achieved.
It's not an easy thing to acomplish. Which is why MS Office is as popular on the Mac platform as it is on Wintel.
Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
The real advantage to that would be to make a Mac the logical upgrade for businesses. They are not a software company, and software is a difficult place to build value right now. Keep the software open, and sell the hardware.
Slow? Thy name is Keynote (Score:1, Insightful)
Let's call a duck a duck. Keynote is slow. Really slow. It bogs down very quickly with slides of moderate complexity. As in not able to keep up with typing. Let's not get into how long Keynote takes to load files.
And Keynote is, shall we say, feature-poor. It has almost no drawing capability at all, a *crucial* necessity for most presentation software. Instead it lets you draw simple lines, bloated arrows and squares and circles. Fantabulous.
Keynote also doesn't handle inter-bullet newlines properly, doesn't change the size of the text to fit the slide (a *terrible* design flaw), has tables which stem from the stone age, has no hyperlink or action button capability... and best of all, none of its themes makes the font smaller when you intend the bullet by default.
Oh, and did I mention it was slow?
Re:Word compatible (Score:3, Insightful)
While it's true that MS cited Safari as the reason to kill off IE for the Mac, keep in mind that Mac IE was a freeware application, hence -- no profits, so why compete with an apple version that has more a more current codebase?
MS on the otherhand makes a tidy chunk of change with their Office X series product for the Mac, also, appleworks has been available for free from Apple for years... so why pull out now rather than just compete?
Also, MS bought up Connectix, the makers of Virtual PC and have already released new versions since, also they bundle Virtual PC with Office X, so by killing off Office X, they face killing off Virtual PC as well and taking a loss (not that they couldn't afford too). On the whole, I don't see it in MS best interests to walk away from OS X as they are only facing competition, not a lock out in the product arena for that platform.
OASIS is the key... (Score:5, Insightful)
If Apple also comes on board, this would help a lot in creating a true office standard-format (for the first time in computing history, until now we just have fluctuating quasi-standards set by whatever version of whatever office suite happens to be in the most widest use) benefit everybody except Microsoft.
I will be able to read OASIS-documents in 20 years, but I have my doubts about MSOffice documents...
With an "i" name it will be targetted at consumers (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Oh, Please Let It Be So! (Score:4, Insightful)
That's odd, I thought I just did.
I'm not really sure what you mean here. What do you allege Microsoft Office interoperates with? I haven't noticed that it operates very well with other vendors software, or that it even operates very well with different versions of itself. As for integration, it seems to be a middling effort, at best. The total integration, between both the office suite elements and between the suite and the OS, seems to be stuck at the level achieved by other vendors back around 1995.
Gosh, and I thought that illegal bundling arrangements and abuse of monopoly power might have had something to do with it. I realize that I hold and unpopular opinion, and that all right-thinking computer users recognize Microsoft for the innovative and benevolent capitalist they are, but I guess I just like being an iconoclast and a parriah.
Re:WORDPEFECT (Score:5, Insightful)
I taught word processing and basic PC skills to paralegals in the 90's. In spite of Word's increasing popularity, many law offices stayed with WordPerfect. Here's what I saw happen:
Law offices adopted WordPerfect because its style sheets and macro features matured before Word's. In a business that produces massive numbers of identically-formatted documents, with many passages repeated from doc-to-doc, robust stylesheets and macros were a powerful selling point.
WordPerfect's keystroke shortcuts were also critical to its success in the law field. Most of the typing in law offices was done by secretaries, who were professional typists. They didn't want thier fingers to leave the keyboard for any reason. And they certainly didn't want to have to wait for a menu to pop up or pull down, and then navigate through that menu (even if they could do so without leaving the keyboard). WordPerfect enabled these professional typists to do everything with keyboard shortcuts only, and bypass slower menus. WordPerfect was to legal secretaries what emacs is to programmers.
Third-party vendors saw the dominance of WordPerfect in the legal profession, and developed thier products around WordPerfect. Whether it was an add-on to produce legal citations more easily, or templates for legal documents, they further supported WordPerfect's dominance in this specialized market.
After spending years developing thier WordPerfect reflexes, integrating third party products, and even writing thier own WordPerfect macros, legal typists were not going to easily abandon the application. So while most of the rest of the world switched to Word, the legal profession has kept on chugging away with WordPerfect. And now every lawyer I know still uses it.
Re:Oh, Please Let It Be So! (Score:4, Insightful)
Open Office and Abiword both work just fine on my windows box.
Small Integrated Pacakges (Score:3, Insightful)
95% of what people need are covered by these 'mini-suites'..
To be honest, I'm surprised they still sell them.. More profit to be made with the 'big boxes'
Re:Oh, Please Let It Be So! (Score:3, Insightful)
Thats likely intentional. Why allow iMovie to edit everything under the sun? Make it work with DV only for home users. If you want more, invest $300 in Final Cut Express.
The Windows Movie Maker/Media player comment was more about the integration iLife has. In iMovie, I click a music tab to see my iTunes collection to add as background music. Movie Maker offers no such integration.
Won't matter. (Score:3, Insightful)
And remember kids, for every mom and dad you get to start using Open Office, there are a thousand companies with a thousand employees each who will continue to buy MS Office. Overthrowing the market leader is possible [joelonsoftware.com] but it gets more and more difficult every year. There are orders of magnitude more Excel users today than there were Lotus 1-2-3 users.
Personally, I think Adobe really missed the boat. They should have made a word processor based on PDF. The full version of Acrobat can edit text, so they should have made something--even as simple as MS WordPad--where PDF was the native format. Since everyone and their brother can read PDFs (and they hold their formatting even better than Word docs) they could have distributed a $50-$100 PDF editor--nothing more than Acrobat Reader and Wordpad--that would have ate MS's lunch. Think about it--anyone with a free tool that they already have can read your documents on any platform, and anyone with an inexpensive editor can make and save changes in the native format. Could've been great.
Re:Oh, Please Let It Be So! (Score:3, Insightful)
Or I can't use OpenOffice either, right? I've got to use MS Office.
MS Office = good (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't really care about a new Apple Office Suite though...
Why do you think Apple does anything? (Score:2, Insightful)
EVERYTHING Apple does (and any other for-profit company, for that matter) is done to increase profit and market share. If that's not the goal, the company won't survive very long. So if the user benefits from something Apple does, hopefully their market share will increase. A great example is the iPod. Before the 4G iPod, I didn't like Apple's products. Now I own an iPod and some accessories. If they ever make the UI of OS X more user-friendly, I might even buy a computer from them, thus increasing their market share and profit. And if MS comes out with a better MP3 player, I'll buy theirs.
Doesn't matter what you think about a company's motivation. They're all in it to make as much money as possible. They do that by satisfying the customer. MS seems to have a pretty good handle on that, regardless of bugs/security problems. People want cheap and easy to use software and are willing to put up with some inconvenience to get that.
Re:AppleWorks isn't dated (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Oh, Please Let It Be So! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hmmm (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree that Apple should be as open as possible.
Regardless of the direction Apple takes on this, open document standards are the most important consideration. I hope they are looking at Open Office or OASIS or any means of ridding us of the cursed concept of some big company having more rights with my data than I do.
I want to send my document to anyone I choose, and know that the recipient will easily work with my document, regardless of the machine or software that they are using.
I want to move between machines at home and work and in between in any of their modes, and still be abled to edit the document.
I want to know that the arrangement of bits and bytes are still useful as long as my data is useful
Business, individuals, the computer industry, everyone should benefit from changing to a document centred world from the current application centred world.
A bold move in that direction will help me to favor a shiny new Mac in a clamshell, when this machine goes belly up (hopefully no time soon). My workstatation/server will probably remain Linux.
The killer-app is dead.
The killer-doc must rule the new information era.
Long live the killer-doc!
Re:Oh, Please Let It Be So! (Score:2, Insightful)
Now, I also don't think it is reasonable to expect a 1st version of an application to be the ulitimate software - but Powerpoint is still in my opinion far ahead. I suspect that much of the new office will be similar - however it will likely be somewhat cheaper (although the student/teacher version of Office2004 is really not bad at all - about $150 Canadian for 3 computers).
I'd also say that despite the desire of many people to bash Microsoft - Excel is an Awesome application. Maybe too many features but it is in my opinion Microsoft's best app. As a biologist - we use a lot of the functionality of the software that goes beyond the routine operation. I doubt Apple's first version spreadsheet software will be able to compete (although the MacRumor site does not seem to think an Excel like app is really on the way).
Re:Let's not co-opt common names... (Score:1, Insightful)
Easy (Score:3, Insightful)
I've said for years the problem isn't multiple platforms. It's the lack of file format standards.
Look at HTML, JPEG, GIF and other widely accepted standards. The same could be done for word proceessing, spereadsheet and presentation type files. Use XML, whcih I think MS was planning until they realized XML based Office files meant you no longer needed Office to work on them. ;-) Not sure what the status of that is now.
A portcullis, you ninny, is lowered! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Oh, Please Let It Be So! (Score:4, Insightful)
>> is simply amazing.
>it is amazing when its Apple but evil when its Microsoft?
Integration isn't inherently bad. It's can be good or bad depending on how it's done.
There's a big difference between the way Apple does it and the way Microsoft does it. Often times, Apple does it to make the consumer's life easier and to provide a benefit. Microsoft often does it to bundle applications together so that you only get the benefits if you use all their stuff.
Case in point: Apple versus Microsoft for personal information management (PIM).
In this corner, we have Apple!
email: Apple Mail
address book: AddressBook
calendar: iCal
In the other corner, we have Microsoft.
email: Entourage
address book: Entourage
calendar: Entourage
Apple uses open standards to store their data. They use an open mbox standard to store messages in Apple Mail. They use vcard to store addresses. They use vcal store calendar stuff.
Microsoft allows you to export messages, but they're Entourage formatted documents, which can only be opened in Entourage. You can't easily move addresses out of Entourage. For example, in AddressBook, you can drag a group of names out, open the file in a text editor, make changes, save it, and drag the vcard back into AddressBook where it will update the changes. I can drag that vcard to any application and do whatever I want with it.
On top of that, any application can access the AddressBook's database in order to use contacts. That's cool.
On the other hand, we have Microsoft's integration. I upgraded to Office 2004, and I would like to use Entourage for email (we're using Outlook for mail at work), but I want to use AddressBook for my contacts (because of its support for Bluetooth phones). Microsoft has tightly integrated their own technologies so I can't switch easily.
Maybe Apple would do the same if the situation were reversed, but the courts (prior to the Bush administration) already convicted Microsoft of abusing its monopoly and illegally bundling applications for the purpose of locking out competition. Clearly Microsoft has a history of illegally bundling in order to control a market.
Re:Apple's fault (Score:2, Insightful)
The big difference here is, I can run X11 apps if I want... and I can code a freely distributable Cocoa app if I want...
In Microsoft's world, I can well, just be stuck.
I for one choose Apple's "proprietary" any day of the week.
Re:Oh, Please Let It Be So! (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple : Individual :: IBM : Enterprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's how Apple could be successful even without MS Office
If the rumors about a robust Apple office suite are true, and I'm pretending I'm Steve Jobs, I'm guessing Apple will continue to work in and around the OS community as IBM has done (and Apple has already done so far).
Apple has learned quite a bit about the open source community by now, after their experiences with Darwin/Mac OS X and KHTML/Safari. The use of open standards is prevalent throughout the bundled applications (Mail -> mbox; Address Book -> vcard; iCal -> icalendar, etc.). Apple should continue this trend with their office suite.
Make the interface irresistible. They have already shown how to do it with ClarisWorks (I never used AppleWorks, but CW 4 was a thing of integrated beauty). They have shown the ability to put great power in simple packages. iTunes. Garage Band. iPhoto. Personally, I have never liked Word's interface (even on the Mac), but there's not a lot of choice. Bring on a contender with a fresh face, and Word's 20-year-old baggage (elements from 1984 are still there -- where's the fscking Font menu!?) will suddenly look very ugly.
Read Word documents reasonably well. Write them perfectly. All translation leaves something to be desired. I don't believe that it is necessary for a Word contender to be 100% feature compatible with Word. It absolutely needs to get styles, sections, margins, tables, footnotes, endnotes, and graphics right, though. A spreadsheet program needs to duplicate the function set of Excel (though not necessarily the syntax; q.v.) It needs to be 100% right for the features that 80% of the people use. Word won not because of its interface, but because people are locked into its format. Break the format and you break the biggest barrier to alternate office contenders. Perhaps this will require work with Open Office developers. That substep should happen no matter what, if only for the following point.
Make the format an open standard. Let anyone write an app to read or write Apple Office documents. This is the corollary to the point above. Don't give people reasons to fear switching to or from your app. Give them the ability to change their mind. That's a feature; people will buy it.
Don't imitate Office Seriously. Do something new. Give people a jump start on new ideas and possibilities. Make everything wiki-like. Docs on the network should be sharable. Build a Subversion repository into every document or home folder.Extend it to every OS X server. Build on the embeddable parts idea from OpenDoc (and semi-executed in CW). Instead of a spreadsheet program, build a full-featured spreadsheet on top of a robust, professional RAD environment with an open API. Let regular people be developers again (whatever happened to HyperCard?).
Buy Omni Group. Or take notes. Or just give them money to continue developing fantastic software. OmniWeb, OmniOutliner, and OmniGraffle are all head-of-class programs. Graffle could easily be part of an Office Pro suite. Especially if you can build and take snapshots of SQL tables like Visio.
IBM is building its business on enterprise open source software like Linux. Apple should continue the progress they have made in the direction of doing the same for personal computing apps.
Re:Excel (Score:1, Insightful)
Well, Excel is the end result of many years of work by many people. It's literally person-centuries of work (if 30 people work on it at any given time that makes it 30 person-years per year... and that doesn't count testers, program managers, etc.). So yeah, you can't just snap your fingers and have an Excel workalike.
On the other hand, depending on your goals, you might be able to build upon the work already done. Gnumeric is a kick-ass spreadsheet. If you don't mind distributing the source, you could grab Gnumeric and run with it... MacNumeric or whatever you want to call it.
Apple could perhaps buy the Applix suite, or Quattro, as a basis, if they want something they can own outright. Apple has serious money in the bank, so they could do this.
One of the problems Apple used to have was rampant NIH ("Not Invented Here") where they would go out of their way to re-invent the wheel. I'll say this for them, they have stopped doing that. OS X is BSD in a pretty new wrapper. Safari is KHTML in a pretty new wrapper. Apple totally would find something as a base project, and if they did they could be competitive quickly.
Oh, and by the way, they don't need to fully re-implement Excel. The vast majority of spreadsheet users just need basic spreadsheet functionality.
Re:Oh, Please Let It Be So! (Score:3, Insightful)
With MS, the apps are portrayed as being necessary to the operation of the OS.
Oh my gawd, you are kidding right, no one on slashdot is really this stupid are they?
1) Remove all of QuickTime off of your precious OSX and see how well finder does QuickTime previews, and other apps like adobe Photoshop or EVEN iMovie import or export QuickTime formats.
Buzz... It will NOT work, just like if you removed Windows Media Codecs and DLLs off your Windows machine. They are SHARED Core libraries that EVEN THE GUI of the OS uses. And yes, even on your precious OSX.
2) There is a difference between the CORE OS and the GUI. I will repeat this once again for the hard of hearing. Win16/Win32/Win64 IS NOT THE WINDOWS NT CORE OS. They are SUBSYSTEM LAYERS. Even NT can run without ANY of these installed on them. NT could run with NO WINDOWS GUI, in fact it does.
3) Explorer can EASILY be replaced in Windows. It has been easy to replace for YEARS AND YEARS. Explorer, just like Finder is NOT NECESSARY for the OS or even the Win32/Win64 GUI to run. Why on earth people would think this is something special or cool or Apple OSX is insane or living in a vacuum.
There are also 25 other things that by removing will bring OSX to a halt or break a ton of applications, just like Windows or any Unix variant that uses shared libraries or resources for the applications.
Why people think that when Microsoft said IE was necessary NOT TO BREAK applications, they somehow assumed this was different than ANY OTHER OS vendor was doing at the time. All OSes use common and shared resources and libraries.
IE was simply a freaking HTML rendering set of technologies, it was NOT the Internet Explorer Browser people always confuse it with.
This is why a third party Windows app back in 1998 could tell Windows to render an HTML page to the screen and Windows would know how and do so in the non-Microsoft application. Just like when an application in OSX or Windows asks the OS to render a Font to the screen, the OS does it for the app, and it don't matter if the Font is Truetype, Opentype or whatever the OS understands. These are NOT different concepts, it is just extending to the OS abilities that were once only in applications. Just like Adobe Font Manager was once needed on Windows and Macs, the OS at the time did not know how to render the font. Now they DO know how to render the font, hence this application's abilities and functionality was brought back to the OS level and provided for use by all applications of Macs and Windows. The same is true of rendering HTML by the OS on Windows, it gave developers a way to use HTML pages without having to write a HTMl rendering engine. And at the time in 1998, a good rendering engine for developers was NOT readily available, and by having that in the Windows OS, saved us developers weeks, and months of work.
It kills me that some of even the top intellectuals here at SlashDot either don't get this, or just don't want to, as it gives them some twisted reason to separate them or what they use from the evil Microsoft.
Re:Apple's fault (Score:3, Insightful)
Any emulating of the native widgets will bring in slight differences that users aren't always aware of consciously (unless they know the OS very well), but will annoy them with the inconsistency. For example, when I press a key I expect my mouse pointer to disappear - that's a system standard. But many apps that weren't written using Apple's frameworks don't do that.
Also, if you just have a translating layer (I'm envisioning something akin to the Aqua look for Java Swing), you'll end up with Aqua controls all clumped up because the positioning wasn't taken into account. Or you'll end up with the preferences option under the Edit menu, because other OSs don't have an app-name menu.
In general, Mac users are far more picky about these things. That's why breaking into the Mac market is hard if you don't put the effort into understanding the philosophy behind the interface. Anyone can do a port of a Windows or X11 app, switching the menus to appear Aqua and changing nothing else - but few Mac users will tolerate it. We require inter-app consistency much more than we do inter-platform consistency within one app. Even Adobe gets slated for some poor interface options in Photoshop that are too geared to the Windows crowd!
An app like Camino is an excellent example. Gecko for rendering (a cross platform library) but a Mac-specific interface. Adium uses gaim as a base library, and adds a Mac interface. These projects work. But when you attempt to port an existing interface, your work will NOT be well received!
Re:Oh, Please Let It Be So! (Score:3, Insightful)
http://www.apple.com/finalcutpro/extensible.htm
Final Cut Pro HD supports XML interchange format, which describes every aspect of a program from edits and transitions to effects, color correction settings and keyframe data. Using XML interchange format, you can seamlessly share project, bin, sequence, clip and media data generated by Final Cut Pro HD with any other application or system that supports XML, including other nonlinear editors, database systems and broadcast servers. Support for media-attached metadata is available by combining XML and QuickTime, enabling media elements to be tracked throughout the production process. And because XML interchange format is open and extensible, you can use Final Cut Pro HD to create fully integrated applications and build a customized post-production pipeline.
Professionals in creative fields tend to be a lot less tolerant than most users about file format lock-in, because for them, when you tell them they can't move their work between apps, you're basically telling them that you're trying to put your bottom line ahead of their creative freedom. That doesn't fly.
Re:What about TextEdit.app? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Oh, Please Let It Be So! (Score:3, Insightful)
Mac users use msoffice because nothing else is as compatible with the windows version of office, and even then the compatibility is nowhere near as good as it should be, even differing versions on the same platform have unreasonably poor compatibility.
If msoffice used open formats, you can be sure there would be many more competitors which could open the files, and marketshare of msoffice in it's current state would be very small.. Altho, i'm sure if they had competition, ms would actually improve their products in a half-assed effort to compete.