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.
What about TextEdit.app? (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Man, Slashdot is really getting behind. Sub-$50 (Score:5, Informative)
Think Secret Predicts Sub-$500 Headless Mac [slashdot.org]
Posted by timothy on Wednesday December 29, @07:03AM
Re:Man, Slashdot is really getting behind. Sub-$50 (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Man, Slashdot is really getting behind. Sub-$50 (Score:5, Funny)
I'm sure they're getting to it. Wait until Timothy gets back online.
Re:Man, Slashdot is really getting behind. Sub-$50 (Score:3, Informative)
They mentioned the sub-$500 last week... [slashdot.org]
Re:appleworks (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:appleworks (Score:4, Informative)
Gnumeric [gnome.org] is better. As a statistician, he should be avoiding Excel anyway due to its known innacuracies in calculations. Gnumeric is better [csdassn.org] on that front, too.
Hope it's functional and not overcandied (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, Please Let It Be So! (Score:5, Interesting)
Who wouldn't welcome a slick, well-integrated, back-to-basics, consumer-grade office suite to come out of Apple?
Re:Oh, Please Let It Be So! (Score:5, Insightful)
It is amazing when its Apple but evil when its Microsoft?
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.
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: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:Oh, Please Let It Be So! (Score:5, Funny)
Well, perhaps holding 'unpopular' opinions makes you feel your are different and special.
Re:Oh, Please Let It Be So! (Score:5, Interesting)
On the other hand, removing Outlook Express seems to cripple MSN Messenger, Outlook and who knows what else.
Re:Oh, Please Let It Be So! (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not saying that Apple is going to do it right, but if they focus on the office suite as one product, not individual products, then I can easily see a better app/system integration than MS has been able to pull off.
I'm doubtful due to two things: FileMaker and Keynote. Clearly, half of the suite is already there, under Apple's full control, and ready to roll. But will we still see a slow office suite, like MS Office, or will Apple actually pull Keynote and Filemaker in to the point where they are parts of one product, not seperate products bundled together.
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: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.
Re:Oh, Please Let It Be So! (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a question of scale. Apple doesn't truly integrate its apps; rather, it creates separate apps that work well together and can easily trade info back and forth, yet no single app is required at all. You could replace every Apple app on your OS X system, and the core OS would still operate fine. Even the Finder. [macosxhints.com]
With MS, the apps are portrayed as being necessary to the operation of the OS.
(tig)
Re:Oh, Please Let It Be So! (Score:4, Informative)
Deleteing Quicktime.app doesn't remove any of the codecs. I can drag it to the trash and empty it, no problem. Finder still previews just fine, thank you. As I understand it, WMP isn't quite so easily removed.
And as long as we're talking about the Finder, I could decide to trash it and port Konquerer, use it as my file browser instead. Or Safari. Or even IE. Now wouldn't that be ironic.
I can download the source and binaries [apple.com] for OS Xs kernel. I can install and run it without any GUI layer at all. Could you please point to directions on how one installs NT without the GUI layer?
Which is why I said 'portrayed' as inseparable. MS seems to want everyone to believe that their apps can't be removed without hampering core functionality. I'm not saying it's true. I understand that the apps are (or should be) nothing more than front-ends.
(tig)
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:Oh, Please Let It Be So! (Score:5, Interesting)
If they can produce Word and Excel equivalents to the level that Keynote demolishes PowerPoint...
People will be begging them for Windows ports.
Re:Oh, Please Let It Be So! (Score:3)
The only reason people need flashy presentations is to compensate for lack of content.
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.
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:5, Informative)
For you, maybe.
What killed powerpoint in our company was the total lack of an export feature for anything not resembling a PC.
After trying 3 different companies' variations of "ppt2dvd", and discovering that all three basically served as a low-framerate screengrab of the running presentation (one wouldn't even work in a dual head setup with ppt running the presentation on the second head), we gave up and used keynote's ability to convert the thing into a video file which we then turned into a dvd.
Re:Oh, Please Let It Be So! (Score:4, Insightful)
Open Office and Abiword both work just fine on my windows box.
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.
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...
Re:Oh, Please Let It Be So! (Score:5, Informative)
Apple, on the other hand, is not a monopoly, and does not fall under such rules.
Re:Oh, Please Let It Be So! (Score:4, Informative)
Microsoft hasn't learned that lesson. They would happily drive all third-party software off their platform. They are notorious for working with their "partners" in the same manner that preying mantises mate. And Microsoft is totally on the rocks because they do that. Right?
So what is it that Apple has to learn, to avoid disaster?
Wonder what code base (Score:3, Interesting)
So I wonder if a full-blown word processor would be a souped-up TextEdit, or base off something else - just like they used KHTML instead of Mozilla as a base for Safari.
Re:Wonder what code base (Score:3, Informative)
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.
left out one adjective (Score:5, Insightful)
Bloatedly slow? (Score:5, Insightful)
He forgot "unstable" (Score:5, Interesting)
And when they do scroll, they cause Word to crash, about once a day. Makes me feel like I'm running Windows 98 again, except I don't have to reboot afterwards.
The name is free (Score:5, Interesting)
(Note, the piece of shareware is now titled "iBiz" [versiontracker.com].)
Re:The name is free (Score:3, Interesting)
they called the prototype the "iPod".
Re:The name is free (Score:5, Interesting)
why not do... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:why not do... (Score:5, Informative)
Also, it's very much in active development, and keeps on improving. They've been working on the low-level stuff first, getting that to work nicely, and they're now starting on making it much more Mac-like. Aqua menus are just one recent addition...
Re:why not do... (Score:3, Informative)
A $499 Mac? How terribly crass (Score:5, Funny)
There was a time, not long ago, when you could tell everything that mattered about a person by his or her choice of operating system. You would notice a man at the local bistro with his titanium PowerBook and a deep garnet Merlot, and you instinctively knew: here is a man with a certain flair, a je ne sais quoi that makes his company worth your while. You'd wonder if the dark-clad woman striding down the street was your type; then you'd notice tucked under her arm a Duo 2300c, so retro and so delicously delicate, and you'd be smitten, simply devastated. You'd go for coffee along Bedford and the two of you would talk about the next East Village gallery opening, or the latest collection from Philippe Starck, or how Frank Lloyd Wright had ruined American architecture.
And it wasn't just about being able to identify like-minded individuals. As a Mac user yourself, you belonged to an exclusive club of discriminating individuals and creative geniuses. Artists like Picasso. Activists like Teresa Heinz. Revolutionaries like Václav Havel. Writers like Dave Eggers. Actresses like Chloë Sevigny. I remember at a cocktail party in SoHo once--it must have been in the mid-'90s--Susan Sontag, Haruki Murakami and I spent hours debating the merits of Mac OS 8's new "Platinum" theme. Those were fine times, indeed.
But ever since the introduction of the mass-produced iMac and iBook, it's been getting harder to distinguish the aesthetically conscious literati from the unwashed masses. It started with the yuppies, and now it's moving on to state-school students and former Dell buyers. On Bedford Avenue, L Café is gone, replaced by a Baby Gap. Soon it will be smelly Linux enthusiasts (ugh!) popping their pimples over translucent keyboards and lickable widgets.
We Mac users were willing to forgive Apple the iPod's popularity, but this... if this rumor is true, then this is going too far. Mon Dieu! Apple, why do you want to sell to these poor peasants? These people don't appreciate beauty and elegance. They don't understand it. They probably even voted for Bush--all four times.
Mr. Jobs, please establish eligibility requirements for the purchase of a new Mac. A good start would be to disqualify anyone who listens to Ashanti or anything they play on K-Rock. You could also disqualify people who think digital watches are cool, as well as all objectivists. In America, don't even bother selling to the lower Midwest. Don't accept applications postmarked from trailer parks. Ban the entire Hilton family.
One way or another, something must be done to preserve the Macintosh community. Anguished but unified, we cry out with one voice. Dam the river, close the gates, pull up the portcullis, keep out the tasteless proles. Please, Mr. Jobs, don't wait until it's too late.
Makes Sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Makes Sense (Score:5, Interesting)
Hopefully Apple will take a look at projects like LyX ( http://www.lyx.org ), the ``What You See Is What You Mean'' document processor.
For those who're wondering why Microsoft Office or Open Office aren't ideal --- contrast them with TextEdit.app which:
- is a Cocoa application
- supports all Mac OS X input methods,
- fonts (incl. AAT fonts like Zapfino)
- Unicode
- Services
That last is one of the under-appreciated advantages of Mac OS X. In _any_ Cocoa application (or Carbon app written to support Services) I can:
- Convert case (ALL CAPS to Initial Caps &c.)
- have autocompletion from a user-defined list
- complete a Citation (using Bibdesk)
- typeset a TeX equation and get an in-place
- sort
- &c.
William
Re:Makes Sense (Score:5, Informative)
Rik
et tu Brute (Score:4, Informative)
Et cetera, often abbreviated to etc., and sometimes in older texts as &c. or &/c. It is often used to represent the logical continuation of some sort of series of descriptions. For example:
We need a lot of fruit: apples, bananas, oranges, etc.
It is important to avoid the phrase "and etc." because then you are saying "and and the others".
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.
Re:Beating MS Office != Trivial (Score:3, Interesting)
I disagree. You are correct in one sense: anybody who already uses Microsoft Office (whether at work or at home) for document creation will be more comfortable sticking with
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: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 becau
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.
I hate to say this... (Score:5, Informative)
Apple may come out with a quality office suite. But if MS Word/Windows users run into even minor incompatability problems with its output, it will fail. I assume the real reason Apple is doing this is because MS may stop supporting MS Office for the Mac. Which would be a real shame. I'm not saying the government should force them to continue supporting the product, but I strongly doubt it's an unprofitable product line. I would certainly buy the next release. Shouldn't shareholders have some say in this? --M
Terrible incompatibility (Score:5, Informative)
Office v.X on the Mac cannot do html round-tripping. So for anyone who prefers to store files as html like I do (for easier style sheet editing - die wysiwig die - and for post processing and export), you are screwed. The html format is not interoperable between the two either, information is lost here as well.
Rumors of planned bundle in systems... (Score:3, Funny)
Please, please displace Microsoft Orifice (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry for the rant.
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.
Re:Word compatible (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Word compatible (Score:3, Interesting)
I think this is a catch-22. If Microsoft feels threated by an OSX office suite then killing Microsoft Office for OSX would only drive people to use it the alternative more. This would be a poor business move until the development costs for OSX become financially discouraging in relation to sales. Microsoft, after all, is in business of selling software to people who will pay for it.
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, th
Re:Word compatible (Score:3, Informative)
They already have iWord, only it's called TextEdit, and it's fully compatible with 98% of Word docs. Most of the rest will be compatible when tables are added in Tiger.
If the name iWorks is correct, it means that this suite won't be aimed at the pro market - that would be PowerWorks. Everything from Apple that starts with "i" has been targeted at the home user. So you almost have it, though your numbers are reversed: iWorks for
They wouldn't dare... (Score:5, Funny)
Office for OS X is profitable for MS, so killing it could only be seen as an obvious anti-competitive move by a convicted monopolist.
If they did that, the US Justice Department would be all over them in a heartbeat...
Oh, sorry. Never mind.
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.
New Features and Competition (Score:3, Interesting)
Hopefully this will create more competition between these office suites and bring about new features to Office market.
Hopefully Apple will try to use some open standards
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:Let's not co-opt common names... (Score:5, Funny)
Windows?
Bloated and Slow MS Office (Score:5, Funny)
I don't know what you are talking about with that comment. My system, 3.6 GHz Pentium 4 with 3 GB RAM, runs MS Office just fine. I believe that is just above the current hardware requirements of MS Office.
Excel (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh-oh-oh! (Score:4, Insightful)
TextEdit with a friendlier GUI (Score:3, Interesting)
Simple Interface
Compatible file formats (Text Edit does to this)
A slightly more robust UI (default-on Fonts window, etc)
Support for tables and graphics.
I already use TextEdit for 50% or more of my writing (basically all but academic papers), and if they could keep the simplicity while making it a bit more similar to most people's experience with Word (keep the 20% of features that end up in 99% of the documents), I'd use it for 100% of my documents.
I've also tried the X11 OpenOffice, and a native port to OSX would be nice. that said, having the Windows-centric keystrokes blows.
C'mon, Apple, you can do it!
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.
Apple should not compete with Microsoft Office (Score:3, Interesting)
I use Microsoft Office at work on the PC, and I know that many others do as well. Having Microsoft Office available for the Mac was the single most important reason that I chose a Mac as a viable computer for home use.
If Apple puts Microsoft in a position where they are competing, Microsoft may well do what they did in the Safari situation and stop developing the product.
No matter how much better an Apple office suite may be, I would see that as being detrimental to the market growth that is inspired by having a document compatible office suite at home.
If Joe Six-pack uses Office at work, he will easily understand that having Office for the Mac as a compatible solution.
Any other solution at home would bring up compatibility questions by default.
Wonder if this has anything to do with Gobe (Score:5, Interesting)
The team that created Productive was also the team behind the original ClarisWorks on the Mac, which too was an amazing feat of integration in a small footprint. Then a different coding team took over, it became AppleWorks, and began to suck royally.
If the team behind Productive is the team behind this rumored office suite, it is going to be one sweet Suite! HA HA HA HA. Seriously, though, they are masters of the art.
Apple Clippy? (Score:5, Funny)
With an "i" name it will be targetted at consumers (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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:Why build when (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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.
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:Why build when (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why build when (Score:3, Informative)
Just to add to this, for non-Mac users who don't know, Apple's X11 support isn't even installed in a default OS X install. Nor is it preloaded onto their systems. If you want it, you either have to select it at install time, or use your OS X install disc(s) to install it yourself, as I had to do on my pre-installed PowerBook G4.
Technical users will have no problem installing this to get OpenOffice installed and running, but many Mac users won't have any desire to do so to run an office suite which has a
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.
Re:bloated office suite? (Score:5, Funny)
I forced myself to learn vi so I could edit my usenet kill files. At one point I had a 600 line kill file for rec.music.misc. Ahh the joy of instantly killing depeche mode discographies and spandau ballet discussions was intoxicating. I think I got more joy watching my kill file at work than reading what was left.
Re:AppleWorks isn't dated (Score:5, Informative)
That said, by the time the name was changed to AppleWorks, the ball had clearly been dropped, and essentially nothing has been done for the past few years. So, dated - yes. Sucked from the get-go - I think (hope) you have a minority opinion there.
Details on ClarisWorks/AppleWorks history here:
http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/~bob/clarisworks.php/ [mit.edu]
Bob Hearn
Re:AppleWorks isn't dated (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Open Office? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm quite certain that should this rumored office suite actually come to market that it will not require XF86 to run. This should please the average Mac user that finds the current OOo interface terrible looking, not to mention very interesting to use.
Don't get me wrong, I use OOo and am happy for it. I hope to help the porting along as much as I can. Right now, it's still scary for most (Mac) people.
Slashdot's Apple section: Rumors for Nerds. Speculation that matters.
Re:Open Office? (Score:3, Interesting)
Hell...I'm new to Mac..and I'm still trying to figure out how to get X to run on OSX...much less X applications. I've to OSX 10.2.8...Most everything I've seen says you need XCode Tools 1.2 or later, but, when I go to that Mac dev. site...it says you have to have Panther to run this version or higher of XCode.
I'm having a hell of a time figuring out how to get open source stuff to run on the Mac..and I'm usually
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 marketi
Re:Who really cares? (Score:5, Interesting)
PCs are in every way superior? Faster? Debateable, it seems the same chip that runs on my desktop is used to build one of the worlds more powerful clusters with one of the highest computing scores per processor. Stronger? When's the last time my OS X box was victim to a worm or virus? Oh, right, never. (If you're running Linux maybe you can say the same thing, but then I guess the machines are equally strong.) Cheaper? Some are, some aren't. Apple has a higher initial price point, but similarly configured PCs are pretty closely price to Macs.
As to the choice of UNIX, by your argument Apple could have picked any core. Picking an OS core isn't something you do for marketing reasons, you make Aqua pretty for marketing. The main reason UNIX was picked was for stability and extensibility. With a clean code base Apple has been able to rapidly pump out an array of applications because they've been able to build powerful frameworks that can be used over and over.
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.
NeoOffice/J (Score:3, Interesting)
I have been trying out the beta version of NeoOffice/J [neooffice.org], which is based on OpenOffice 1.1.3, and have found it to be much nicer than the X11 version of OpenOffice.
The main downside is that it is somewhat sluggish on my G4 Powerbook being written in Java (using the Carbon interface). But having access to all of my fonts, and better rendering make up for any speed issues I have noticed.
Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Funny)
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:MS Office = good (Score:4, Funny)
You have a syntax error there. You are assigning the property good to MS Office. You should really be using the comparison operator ==
therfore your statement should read: MS Office == good
Just to jump the gun and answer your next question, the value of that expression will be false.