[Am-info] New Apple store near Beantown

[Paul Rickard]

========== On 2001.12.16 11:55 PM, John Bryan typed: ============

>Wasn't there also
>
>   4/ Continue to provide Office apps for Mac for next 5 years (which is 
>up next 8/02 BTW) ?

     That's when things get really in-te-resting. If you think Steve Jobs 
got vocal about the antitrust settlement, just wait until that contract 
is up. Apple doesn't need Microsoft NEARLY as desperately as it did in 
1997 when most people didn't expect the company to see the 21st century. 
Apple has reestablished itself as a good brand, a producer of dependable 
products with (limited) mass appeal, and a company with a future. Apple 
is financially stable enough to survive for years without selling a 
single product, so there's less pressing demand for a quick fix like 
there was in the summer of 1997. AppleWorks can read and save to some 
Office document formats, so Office is no longer required for at least 
partial compatibility. Plus Steve and Co. are well aware that Microsoft 
doesn't need them anymore to make itself look like less of a monopoly and 
is free to attack at any time, so they'll be more careful about going 
into the Beast's cage.
     If Microsoft and Apple agree to anything else after August it will 
be much less favorable to Microsoft, but I would honestly be surprised to 
see any further agreement between the two whatsoever. Keep in mind that 
Microsoft is quickly changing its paradigms to that loopy distributed 
software .NET scheme, so there will be no more updates for Mac Office (or 
anything else really) without attachment to Passport and MSN. There will 
be no .NET on the Macintosh, so Office:Mac for OS X will be the end of 
the road. There's no way Apple will get sucked into that distributed 
rentware tar baby as long as Steve Jobs and Avie are inside the company. 
I just can't imagine that ever happening, unfathomable, impossible.

          ...I hope I don't live to eat those words.



======== Paul Rickard, Editor of The Microsoft Boycott Campaign =======
--------------------------------[ Http://www.msboycott.com ]-----------

  "It's possible, you can never know, that the universe exists only for
   me. If so, it's going quite well I must admit." -Bill Gates