Joined: Dec 08, 2005 Posts: 291 Location: Berlin, Germany
Posted: Fri Apr 28, 2006 12:29 pm Post subject: Cringely: Super-secret native port running in Apple labs?
Robert X. Cringely is an IT-columnist with some recent crazy, but not altogether uninteresting thoughts about Apple's strategy concerning Microsoft, Windows and Intel Macs. In his latest post ...
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20060427.html
... he speculates about Office applications and Apple's contingency plans for the moment, when MS (because of increased competition) may withdraw MS Office from the Mac OS X platform:
Quote:
Office is how Microsoft makes most of its revenue, and Office is the bludgeon Microsoft uses to keep other software vendors in line. Without Office, Microsoft is just a company with an archaic and insecure OS. If Apple does go ahead to compete head-to-head with Microsoft for Microsoft's own Windows customers, Cupertino will have to be ready in case Mac Office is withdrawn and Windows Office mysteriously breaks on Apple hardware. (...) Just as Apple had contingency plans for losing Internet Explorer and kept Safari secret even from the KHTML developers, and quietly planned for the contingency of an Intel/AMD switch, so, presumably, they have a contingency for the equally large problem of Office. The obvious contender is OpenOffice, although considering their KHTML move, Koffice would have to be a contender, too (although it needs much more work).
Then there's some talk about compatibility, Microsoft's Open XML & Open Document Architecture, which I couldn't quite follow, but all that leads to the point, that the LGPL-license of OpenOffice would be the right license for Apple plans to build an office app with the best compatibility for all major office document formats so far. Cringely closes with
Quote:
Such compatibility would be the killer app component in that native Quartz version of OpenOffice I am sure Apple has had idling in the lab just in case Microsoft pulls the plug on Mac Office. Throw in FileMaker as an Access-killer, and they'll really have something. If true, this is all very clever of Apple. The cleverest part of all is that they can hold off on a final decision because the software was cheap to do and has probably been ready for months, if not years.
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Fri Apr 28, 2006 12:53 pm Post subject:
Cringly (like Dvorak) loves to blow hot air out his a** at the wall and see what sticks If anything, KOffice is more believable than OOo, but I think neither.
iWork is really the culmination of the Claris design team and is the horse they're backing. It's also built using Apple's design and development tools which is a big plus.
The problem with both OOo and KOffice is that they both flaunt a large number of Apple interface design standards, not only platform design standards but also general UI appearance and layout. Apple applications have a certain "feel" to them, especially those targeted at consumer, that illustrate refined GUI research and evaluation. This is something that is severely lacking in all open source suites, IMHO.
So really Apple would need to strip out the interface and redesign it to be more sane...at which point the entire rendering engines are all that are really used. Cocoa already has most of that covered...so there's no upside.
Apple won't ship something that's not "Apple" enough, and engineeringwise it's a lot easier to build with platform native tools than to try to shoehorn into someone else's entire strategy. Unlike KHTML which had both the rendering/parsing engine and JavaScript separated, OOo isn't engineered to provide modular "building blocks" that are separate from the UI. They're really tightly wound together, and the UI stuff is tightly wound to an abstract widget layer that's used by no other product. There's no benefit to spending all the engineering effort to refactor an 8 million line source code base when Apple's already got good stuff in house, if not better. So I think Cringly is just talking out his a** again.
Bundling FileMaker into iWork, though, would rock. I think Cringly's onto something there. I'd consider buying iWork just for filemaker and see Pages and Keynotes as freebies
Oh, and as to the file format stuff, facts are that Apple is a member of the consortioum pusing the Open Microsoft XML standards and is not a member of any OpenDocument consortium. As such, I doubt they're interested in participating in the public "formats" war.
Joined: Dec 08, 2005 Posts: 291 Location: Berlin, Germany
Posted: Fri Apr 28, 2006 4:29 pm Post subject:
I thought pretty much the same - why would they start releasing Pages and Keynote, and probably have "Numbers" somewhere waiting to be published. But: These applications rather fit into the "digital lifestyle" area, with their deep integration with iPhoto, iTunes etc. So I don't think there will be bundling with Filemaker, which, looking at its price, would really render iWork as an add-on.
Cringely's thoughts are (for me) interesting because they fit somehow into the current "problem area": Everybody is looking for clues how Apple will position itself in relation to Microsoft & the other PC sellers. Some think that there will be a try for a really bigger market share. Question then: What about Mac in business? iWork can't compete there with MS Office.
Cringely may not know the OpenOffice codebase very well (and that's why he is almost certainly wrong), but he has a point when it comes to Apple's propensity for control & sneakiness.
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Fri Apr 28, 2006 5:10 pm Post subject:
Well, that's really the elephant in the room...will Apple try to break into the business market? Personally, I doubt that one will be able to happen anytime soon. If anything, it's not possible to really break in with MS Office Mac. A substantial portion of business "integration" software (especially those targeted at smaller business) tend to use MS Office Windows as a development platform. Things report out of Access databases into Excel, Outlook extensions for IP call forwarding, etc.
People think of MS Office as an office productivity suite, but that's actually just a smaller part of the puzzle. Office is a development platform between spreadsheet macros, VBA, and the like. With the future Office plans, that aspect will become more and more true. Not even Office:mac has the functionality to be a competitive development platform.
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Fri Apr 28, 2006 11:40 pm Post subject:
To be fair to AppleWorks, though, it's a legacy Carbon app, and moving those over fully can be painful. But really...the Rosetta emulator is durned fast and is more than fast enough to deal with AppleWorks, Office:mac, and any other application that spends the majority of its time waiting for someone to type.
It's really when you start hitting the heavy CPU intensive apps (Photoshop, MATLAB, Final Cut Pro, etc.) that suddenly the new machine seems slower.
Since AppleWorks was actually ported to Carbon, if all you need to do is type letters and assemble the home budget, it'll continue to function adequately for as long as Rosetta is supported. It'll only be a matter of a 3-4 years before Rosetta will be faster computationally than any physical PowerPC based Mac. PowerPC emulation is still faster than any 68k machine I know of. Didn't it achieve that with the 9600?
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If anything, KOffice is more believable than OOo, but I think neither.
