Journal macdaddy's Journal: Microsoft's future Mac products plan? 2
The whole reason Microsoft bought Virtual PC and Connectix is really quite simple. Microsoft is going to pull the plug on all their Apple development for all of their products except for Virtual PC. "Why?" you might ask? Consider this, Microsoft is having to develop their office and home use applications twice, once for x86 and once for PPC. They are duplicating development efforts for:
Note that Internet Explorer is not listed since it is no longer being developed by Microsoft for Macs. (yippeeee!!!!!)
That's a lot of redundant development, especially for a platform that's not even their own!
How can Microsoft lower their development overhead and still either a) sell products to Mac users or b) convince users to switch to Windows? To me the answer is very obvious. Microsoft is developing a common codebase for which to run their existing applications off of. They can save money by porting Windows to a Mac environment, just like in Virtual PC. They no longer have to code everything twice. A x86 version of Office 2010 will run just fine under Virtual PC on a Mac. That is how they lower their costs. Now they only have one application to develop: Virtual PC. That completes their first goal. They get revenue from more sales and have to do very little work to make it happen. How do they eventually get this userbase to switch to x86 Windows though? It's simple really: They pull a bait and switch and drive their mac customers to Windows. They could do this by introducing instability into Virtual PC that leaks over into OS X. They blame the crashing on Apple and lure some users away to x86-ville. They get everyone switched to Office via VPC but introduce a bug with the release of a new Office. The new Office won't run on VPC. Again they blame Apple. Microsoft then drags it's feet on "patching" VPC so that the new Office can run on it (funny, I thought this was a Windows environment...) all the while blaming Apple for bad coding and not sharing APIs. In the process they lure more users away. They do this every time a new Office comes out that uses a different file format. The Office via VPC users are continually stuck using a dated version that can't open documents from a new version of Office on x86. Frustration leads to migration; bye bye more users. Eventually Microsoft is just going to leave the Mac arena but not until after making a big public todo over how bad OS X is and how Apple leveraged its position wouldn't share APIs as well as intentionally making Microsoft products run poorly on OS X. This will of course be a load of hooey but the smear campaign will work to some degree. More people will switch to x86 just to get Office back.
Think it won't happen? I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you. It seems to make perfect sense. The loss of Microsoft applications on Macs is a good thing to me--a damned good thing. Internet Explorer on OS X was a joke. It was HORRIBLE. IE literally locked me out of a PacketShaper 4545 once. That put a stupid look on my face, all because some genious programmer at Microsoft decided that IE should modify all pre-configured text fields on a form before form submissions, even if the field hadn't had its text altered. Genious. The worst thing about Microsoft products leaving the Mac arena is that this will give anti-Mac IT folks a chance to say no more Macs on the network. No more Office on Mac means that the Mac users won't be able to share files easily with the PC users. Anti-Mac IT folks will have a foothold to keep Macs off the network from then on.
I sure hope OpenOffice becomes usable on all platforms in the very near future. If it becomes adpoted soon enough, we might not really care what Microsoft does...
This of course is my opinion; I could be wrong.
OO on Mac (Score:2)
From what I understand, there is an effort underway to make a native aqua version.
But just to be plain, there is a version of OpenOffice for Mac.
Re:OO on Mac (Score:2)