Documentary evidence that Microsoft considered abandoning Office for Mac in order to cause 'a great deal of harm' to Apple has emerged. An emailed memo from Microsoft-founder Bill Gates to then Mac Business Unit chief Ben Waldman dated June 1997 talks about morale in the Mac Office development camp. At that time Microsoft's senior management were considering dumping Mac support. The email complains at poor sales of Office, which it attributes to a lack of focus on making such sales among reps at that time.
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Member since:2006-02-19
Member since:2005-07-06
New versions of MS-Office seldom are 100% compatible with older versions. The reason that Microsoft Office works so is that the entire organization usually changes version simultaneously and the spreadsheets are fixed to work with the new version if any problems should occur.
Switching to OpenOffice.org in all places would not be more problematic than upgrading to the next version of MS-Office, and even if it was more difficult, there would be a lot of money to save on licensing that could be used to convert whatever few spreadsheets that didn't work. My guess is that they would be very few, the OOo, MS-Office interoperability have increased a lot lately due to additions from e.g. Novell.
The problem is that Apple users will not accept OpenOffice.org unless there is a version running without X11.
Member since:2006-04-21
"I totally agree, that 90% compatibility is meaningless in the enterprise. "
Barring its use in DTP departments, which probably do not use MS Office or at least the "enterprise" features of MS Office anyway, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple is more "meaningless" in the enterprise than OpenOffice.
Member since:2005-07-11
There WAS no OS X in 1997. In 1997, we were still using Mac OS 8.
And losing office for the Mac wouldn't have hurt Apple all that much since under OS 8/9 there were plenty of alternatives.
ClarisWorks
AppleWorks
Write Now
Mariner Write
WordPerfect
and many others.
And even if Microsoft had stopped developing Office for the Mac, the existing version at the time would still have worked fine for some time to come.
Open Office had not even been ported to MacOS at that time.
Let's put this in perspective
Member since:
2005-07-06
Did you read the article? It is from 1997, your price quotes are fairly meaningless in that context.
And to speak to your percentages, how many enterprises have a few Macs? Lots. Maybe just small departments here and there, but no MS Office would be a deal killer for them. Particularly when that 10% that you speak of means the difference between interoperating with the rest of the enterprise or not.
Yes, for casual home or even small business use, OpenOffice or NeoOffice are great. But MS abandoning Mac Office would have been a serious set back for OS X.