Submitted by BusinessWeek explores why the chance is right for Apple to license the Mac OS to 3rd party hardware vendors. “First, the caveats: there’s as much chance that Apple will license the MacOS as there is that Steve Jobs will show up to his next keynote wearing a dress instead of the usual attire. Secondly, he’s probably right not to change course, because there’s plenty of evidence that Apple’s proprietary approach is the way to go to win the huge consumer electronics and digital media markets that are now opening up. But humor me anyway, because it’s actually an interesting time to consider the question.”
Opening up Mac OS X to 3rd paty hardware vendors=no Microsoft Office for the Mac. No Microsoft Office for the Mac=Death for the platform. It is that simple.
I disagree. Apple could always get the document formats and create their own applications that read/write to those formats. iWrite does, I use it instead of MS Word all of the time for work.
Now if only they’d come up with their own version of excel.
It’s so simple. OpenOffice.
It’s so simple. OpenOffice.
Except that Apple has already publicly pooh-pooh’d OpenDoc and stated their support for MS Office formats.
But then again, they also publicly pooh-pooh’d Intel and stated their support for PPC, so I guess anything can happen.
I think the death for the platform is here with windows xp running on the intel mac’s.
Everytime someone says something like “Windows xp on intel mac? wtf?” someone answers “Games, not available apps, etc”.
With vmware and other apps running full-speed, soon I’m guessing a lot of manufacturers simply won’t care “because they’ll dual-boot anyway”. Sound familiar? It’s linux gaming all over again.
Do you seriously think that >25% of the _entire_ mac community (grandma included) is going to dual boot, when it’s a tech-only thing.
That alone is as far fetched as Apple licensing OSX, just as things are getting very profitable.
I don’t believe a company as big and as scrutinized as Microsoft, who has been convicted of illegally abusing its monopoly position in the past, could get away with dropping Mac Office in retalliation for OS X being installable on a Dell. They’d be in court overnight.
It would also be a stupid move for MS to do that, since Mac Office already makes a nice chunk of money, and would only make more if OS X were more widespread.
I also don’t believe no MS Office = Death of the Platform. We only need one more version of Office, a Universal Binary version of Office 2007 or whatever they’ll call it. After that, who needs another one? Aren’t Word, Excel, Entourage and PowerPoint pretty much feature complete already? At this point they just move around icons, switch some menus up, make the theme match whatever Apple is doing that year, and call it a new release.
I don’t believe a company as big and as scrutinized as Microsoft, who has been convicted of illegally abusing its monopoly position in the past, could get away with dropping Mac Office in retalliation for OS X being installable on a Dell. They’d be in court overnight.
It would also be a stupid move for MS to do that, since Mac Office already makes a nice chunk of money, and would only make more if OS X were more widespread.
There would be nothing illegal about MS dropping Office support for Mac, in much the same way as there is nothing illegal about iTunes not supporting Windows Media (outside of France, that is). In fact, MS dropped IE and WMP for OS X, which were the cause of most of their Windows-based anti-trust grief originally, with barely a peep of protest.
And short of a contractual commitment in place between MS and Apple, dropping Office for OS X would be almost assured. Apple needs Office for any legitimacy in their aspirations as an alternative business platform, just ask any number of commercial linux distro makers.
Microsoft’s juice comes from corporate customers, and Apple is simply a statistical deviation in the enterprise space. Many of those Office/Mac versions are going to small businesses/home users who might otherwise be using MS Works bundled in with their system otherwise. So it’s incremental revenue that they might otherwise lose if Windows customers had a cheaper alternative.
But OS X on generic platforms changes things and could open up Apple to a much larger market; it’s not assured that Apple could translate that into greater marketshare in the enterprise space, but there’s no conceivable way that MS would risk facilitating that. They may as well release Office for *nix if they’re going to do that.
Well they’re doing similar stuff already. Stopped making IE for OS X a long time ago (well, this is a good thing!). Now they stopped developement of Windows Media Player for OS X and just tell us to use a 3rd party application, that unfortunately in many, many cases just doesn’t work.
I don’t see them going to court for this, although it already is a big problem for many Mac users.
It’s just a matter of time until they tell us Office will also be integrated into the OS and won’t be developed for the Mac anymore. Just you wait.
Really? So all the Photosgraphers, Designers and the large contingent of Directors who use Final Cut & Co. will just up and leave?
I doubt that very much.
…with ideas. But what’s the point since, as they say, it won’t happen. This is one avenue Apple will never take. Jobs wants to maintain control of the WHOLE PACKAGE. He wants it apple designed and [contracted to be] built so that it comes close to his idea of aesthetics.
Also, Jobs seems to be moving toward the audio/video realm of things. Yes, he still makes computers and an OS, but Apple seems to be shifting toward broadcasting and communications (just beginning, so it is hard for me to actually CLAIM that is where they are going, but it “feels” that way to me).
This story isn’t really a story, it’s just an opinion piece,a nd probably should be marked as such
That idea is pure bologna sausage.
Vista doesn’t offer any compelling features for Joe Sixpack.
None of the alternatives offer any compelling features either.
Things are going to keep going pretty much the way they have been, with the sixpacks of the world only upgrading thier operating systems when the buy a new computer.
What about power 5 and power 5 servers, but not on any other X86 computers.
I think open document formats are a more interesting approach. What Apple really needs to work on is fostering a multitude of Coop-a-tition instead of directly attacking MS. Apple really needs to help out Linux in an “enemy of my enemy way”. Linux needs legit codex and commercial support. Apple could provide this in a Linux iTunes/quicktime without pissing off MS openly. Also they wouldn’t loose their market for NEW machines, only let Linux canibalize Windows marketshare.