[Am-info] A GREAT Atricle from our own Joe Barr!!

[Mitch Stone]

Will all due respect to Joe, I'm fairly certain the existence of Office 
for OSX does not provide Microsoft much of an advantage in leveraging the 
applications to Linux. OSX Office is written to the Carbon APIs -- a 
subset of the classic MacOS APIs.

This isn't an issue I claim to understand very well, but I've seen some 
related discussion about the (mythical) OSX for Intel. The people who know 
much more about this then I do are saying that Apple's biggest problem 
would be moving the Carbon programming interface to another hardware 
architecture, which suggests that these are not very portable APIs.

To Joe's second point: the potential for Microsoft to develop a Windows 
GUI for Linux has intrigued me for a long time; in fact I'm pretty sure it 
came up around here a year or so ago. This scenario actually makes quite a 
bit of sense (and dollars), when you consider the markup on Windows versus 
Office. Opening up new markets for software at this point might be more 
lucrative then opening up new markets for Windows.

As Joe rightly points out, Windows is about control, and Microsoft might 
be able to exert as much control over the computing platform with a 
proprietary GUI as they can presently with the entire OS -- and at the 
same time, offload the boiler-room work to somebody else. In a way, they'd 
be tearing yet another page from Apple's book (Darwin + Aqua).

Mitch

On Tuesday, July 30, 2002, at 12:20 PM, Fred A. Miller wrote:

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> Why Microsoft is exhibiting at LinuxWorld Expo
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> http://www.idg.net/go.cgi?id=718992