[Am-info] New Apple store near Beantown

[Eric Bennett]

Paul Rickard wrote:
> 
> ========== On 2001.12.17 12:54 PM, Mitch Stone typed: ============
> 
> >You make a good point, but I'll disagree with only one aspect of it --
> >the loss of Office for the Mac would harm the platform's future viability
> >substantially, even now. I would not be surprised if the next phase of
> >the antitrust case (and you know there's going to be one), centers around
> >Microsoft ability to damage competitors by withdrawing availability their
> >monopoly software products.
> 
>      It would hurt the platform, sure... The loss of ANY product for the
> Macintosh hurts the platform, even if it's just a game title or a piece
> of junky shareware. Office will have a bigger impact than anything else,
> of course, but at this point in time I don't see that losing Office would
> damage Apple as much as some people think. Especially not to the degree
> it would have in 1997 or 1998. Apple HAD to have Office then to survive.
> Now it's just something that would be damaging to lose but not
> devastating. If Microsoft pulled Office, we would quickly see AppleWorks
> become more comprehensive (I think Apple left a lot out there to keep it
> from competing head on with Office) and probably see a Mac version of
> StarOffice or even WordPerfect-sans-Microsoft.

That leaves the problem of having to exchange documents with the vast
majority of people who use Office.  As many people have discovered,
translations by other programs are usually inadequate, especially if you
have to modify the document and return it to the sender.  Last time I tried
to import a Word file into WordPerfect, it deleted all the graphics and
tables and lost most of the formatting.  For serious work that requires
exchanging documents, this is unusable, and nobody really accepts documents
in Star Office or AppleWorks formats.  Some people still accept WordPerfect
but Corel just went through a very long and drawn out process of trying to
decide whether to continue development of the Mac version and despite pleas
from users, they dropped it.  I have a hard time believing they'll be
convinced to change their mind on that any time soon.

If Microsoft dropped Mac Office, we'd probably keep using the old version
of Mac Office at work, until people stop accepting it, and then we'd
probably have to get a PC (even if it was to run WordPerfect instead of
Office for Windows).

Of course, the old formats can be acceptable to at least some organizations
for a long time, but new formats don't seem to show up too quickly.  Here's
what the American Chemical Society takes for papers submitted to its large
number of journals:
http://pubs.acs.org/instruct/mssondsk.html

-- 
Eric Bennett ( ericb@pobox.com ; http://www.pobox.com/~ericb )

If I return people's greetings, I do so only to give them
their greeting back.  - Karl Kraus