“Last July in New York, Kevin Browne, General Manager of Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit, provided an early glimpse at how the company’s overall .NET strategy would affect the Mac. At that time, Browne told eWEEK that he expects the company to continue selling an “unconnected” version of Mac Office, as opposed to fully adopting .NET’s strategy of remote software services. He also said that the company’s plan — which could change, he noted — was to offer two versions of Office for Mac: One non-.NET version, similar to the one sold in stores today, and another less-expensive version that takes advantage of .NET services to enhance its feature set.” Read the rest of the report at Think Secret.
Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit Resisting .NET Push
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
oh great….so now, when office .net is released, and the mac version is loosed upon the mac, MS will get a strangle on the system….APPLE!!!! get rid of IE, or atleast help develop Mozilla for OS X!! we need a better mainstream browser (no offence to opera or omniweb, or any other browsers out there, its a mindshare thing)
I’ve tried to read up on .Net to fully understand what it is, and I think I get some of it. Even though I don’t completely get it, the ideas behind it still make me nervous. As a soon to be Mac user, I thought the .Net stuff wouldn’t affect me. I hope a non-.NEt version is available.
One way or the other, I think the Mac needs MS Office. Either that or there has to be a way for Mac users to share Office files with PC users using some other word processor.
Despite what you may think about MS Office being bloatware (which I am not inclined to disagree with you), it’s still the standard for most businesses, so compatibility is critical on any platform that wants to compete.
When I was talking about compatibility, I meant MS Word for the most part.
It sounds to me like someone forgot to explain to the MacBU at MS (or maybe the article simply didn’t explain it well) that there’s a difference between .Net and Hailstorm/.Net My Services. While I can understand making two versions of Office (one that utilizes Hailstorm and one that doesn’t), I don’t really understand why they would ship a version that doesn’t utilize the .Net architecture at all, especially if they’re going to go through the trouble of porting the .Net architecture to OS X (for the Hailstorm version). OS X could have a lot to gain from having the .Net architecture available for it, as it would mean porting applications between it and Windows should be a lot easier (with the same API (.Net) for most functions).
Eugenia from osnews.com emailed me a link to an article he wrote about .Net (thanks again). After reading it and understanding .Net a bit more, I think it might be a good idea for Mac to jump in a bit here.
Why not support .Net, maybe get gamers to switch over to the Mac platform (since the games might be .net coded), but the GUI and OS would still be Mac’s. Maybe I didn’t understand the article correctly, but it seems like the Mac OS can remain independent but still support .net architecture. The thing that people say makes OS X better than Windows is the GUI, not the unix core (personally, I’ve run win2k and XP for years and it’s always been really stable). Can’t Mac keep up their advantages in the GUI department, keep it Unix based for stability, and still handle .Net?
I’m still nervous though. Somebody had to come up with a .Net-like system, it just makes sense. It also makes sense that a company like Microsoft would get to it first, but the software renting and direct withdrawels from my checking account and Microsoft needing to keep such close track of my computer for the whole thing to work still really bothers me.
Overall, it seems dumb to have to have specific codes for specific platforms, but I don’t want .Net to replace OS’s. I don’t know if I’m making any sense.
>>One way or the other, I think the Mac needs MS Office. Either that or there has to be a way for Mac users to share Office files with PC users using some other word processor.<<
Yeah that is true and I agree, but I don’t think we need .NET thing for the Mac, it’s not in our best interest, and I personally don’t want to be dragged thru the .NET mud being enforced by Apple and MacBU to please the likes of Microsoft!
> Somebody had to come up with a .Net-like system, it just
> makes sense.
An Amiga games developer has been working on a far superior platform independent multimedia orientated solution, long before Sun even began their development on Java. Inent has now become an http://www.ocpa.jp/“>industry . To better understand its potential I recommend digging through OSNews archives with the keyword: “AmigaDE”. 🙂
The only good reason I can think of for commercial developers to support .NET instead of AmigaDE is maybe that you are a VisualBasic developer. I hope it won
>>An Amiga games developer has been working on a far superior platform independent multimedia orientated solution, long before Sun even began their development on Java. Inent has now become an industry standard. To better understand its potential I recommend digging through OSNews archives with the keyword: “AmigaDE”. :-)<<
It seems to me that the AmigaDE would make much more sense than .NET (just my opinion)! So maybe Apple should support that standard instead and share a common bond with Amiga, especially since the 2 support the PPC architecture (ok AmigaOne does it all, but you know what I mean:-)!
Well Microsoft once was an Amiga developer and even <a href=”http://raggedtiger.tripod.com/MicrosoftPressAmigaAd.jpg“>promote… “the rich artistic depths of this fantastic machine”. Yes times have changed, but the Amiga community is making a comeback.
I actually have read a few things about this and I agree, this seems like the perfect solution for the end user, but does it solve the development headaches the way .Net seems to (for developers)?
The only downside to Amiga is the fact that Microsoft can “guarantee” .Net implementation, where Amiga might have some trouble getting backing. Sure, backing from Mac would be nice, but that whole 3% market share doesn’t necessarily translate into wide spread acceptance.
>>…but the Amiga community is making a comeback.
<<
I think this is good and I wish them the best of luck, and hope they can help push the PPC platform even farther than Apple on the desktop, if that is Amiga’s intent in the near future. I’d be willing to buy an Amiga if it was PPC based. I would like to see some screenshots of the future release of AmigaOS 4.0, but can’t seem to find anything thus far.
The way I see it, the more diverse the computing industry is, the better!
GO AMIGA GO!!!
The only aspect of the .NET future I have a problem with is the need to always be online. I don’t want to have to be online in order to write a damn paper in Word.
I’m still nervous though. Somebody had to come up with a .Net-like system, it just makes sense. It also makes sense that a company like Microsoft would get to it first, but the software renting and direct withdrawels from my checking account and Microsoft needing to keep such close track of my computer for the whole thing to work still really bothers me.
The simple solution is to not use My Services/Hailstorm, just stick with the .Net architecture and avoid the whole web services thing, unless you’re developing web services yourself (in which case, host them yourself, develop everything you need or get it from someone besides MS, and again avoid Hailstorm). Software rental, subscription withdrawals, and MS keeping track of the computer are not part of the architecture itself, though the architecture makes those things easier for people to build and/or use.
The only good reason I can think of for commercial developers to support .NET instead of AmigaDE is maybe that you are a VisualBasic developer. I hope it won
Visual Basic or about 15+ other languages supported by .Net. As it stands, there are commercial plug-ins for Visual Studio.Net to support COBOL, Component Pascal, Dyalog APL, Eiffel, Fortran, Mercury, Mondrian, Oberon, Pascal, Perl, Python, RPG, Scheme, SmallScript/Smalltalk, and Standard ML. In addition to VB, C/C++, C#, and the various HTML scripting languages supported (VBScript, JScript, etc), and, eventually, J# (which is basically Java compiled for .Net instead of a JavaVM). Since the CLI is an ECMA standard, anyone can support .Net with whatever language they choose by adding CLI extensions to the language.
“Software rental, subscription withdrawals, and MS keeping track of the computer are not part of the architecture itself, though the architecture makes those things easier for people to build and/or use.”
It’s not a part of the architecture, but it seems like that’s how they intend the architecture to be implemented. I guess another question I have is how do they decide what features to include and what to require a download/rental? Again, I like the concept, the elimination of .dll’s… I’m very curious about how this all actually rolls out. I guess I’m still not clear on how this will all be packaged and sold.
It’s not a part of the architecture, but it seems like that’s how they intend the architecture to be implemented. I guess another question I have is how do they decide what features to include and what to require a download/rental? Again, I like the concept, the elimination of .dll’s… I’m very curious about how this all actually rolls out. I guess I’m still not clear on how this will all be packaged and sold.
It depends on what kind of application you want to build. The primary purpose of the .Net architecture does seem to be geared towards web services and all of that stuff, but it does include a lot of things that make basic stand-alone applications easier to build, as well. As a developer you can use the .Net architecture just as easily for applications that don’t access anything outside of the client computer as you could to build something dependant on web services.
In other words, you could build OfficeXP with the .Net architecture, or you could build an Office.Net that requires internet access and special subscriptions to get certain features, and those features could be anything from simple online hosting or collaboration, all the way up to the client being a shell that gains all of it’s functionality from the web services (or the whole application sitting behind a web page front-end, for that matter).
As far as what kind of applications can be built with .Net, there’s no real difference between it and the Win32 API (except, of course, that it should be easier to build a .Net implementation for another platform than a Win32 API implementation). What .Net is trying to do is make it easier for people to build their applications, and especially easier for them to build ‘web services’.
I think the primary thing that MS screwed up on in all of their marketing is that they didn’t make it clear to the end users that the .Net architecture and .Net My Services (and everything else with .Net tacked onto it) are different things. The .Net architecture is what allows them to do the rest of the things, but it’s not specifically any of those things in itself. They tend to push the web services angle because it’s where they could be making the most money from the framework, but, to quote directly from the .Net framework site: The Microsoft .NET Framework is the programming model of the .NET platform for building, deploying, and running Extensible Markup Language (XML) Web services and all types of applications—both desktop and Web-based.
The http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/prodinfo/overview.asp“>ov… goes even further into confusing people by pointing out that .Net is just about everything they’re going to release in the next 4 years, and anything built with it.
I think that painkiller pretty much summed up what I wanted to say: .NET is merely a framework or a way of making applications. .NET apps can be web services, but do not necessarily require to be so or even involve the internet. You can use .NET to make notepad, paint, or a console program for example, which do not involve the internet in anyway.
Because .NET is platform independent (in theory), I think that various alternative operating systems should try to support .NET, just as they have supported java. If Microsoft is betting their company on .NET and are going to programm all their applications using .NET, that means that if an operation system, such as OS X or even LINUX supports .NET, all of Microsoft’s .NET applications (which will practically be all of their apps) can run on these nonWindows operating systems. Rather than work on emulating or support the aging win32 (ie WINE), work on .NET support (ie MONO), which is the future of Windows applications.
Just my $.02
Because .NET is platform independent (in theory), I think that various alternative operating systems should try to support .NET, just as they have supported java. If Microsoft is betting their company on .NET and are going to programm all their applications using .NET, that means that if an operation system, such as OS X or even LINUX supports .NET, all of Microsoft’s .NET applications (which will practically be all of their apps) can run on these nonWindows operating systems. Rather than work on emulating or support the aging win32 (ie WINE), work on .NET support (ie MONO), which is the future of Windows applications.
I agree, except for one small catch: the CLI standard (the basic groundwork that Mono is using to build their implementation of .Net) allows for extensions, by MS or anyone else. This means that MS could use extensions to the CLI in their .Net architecture, and utilize those extensions in Office or other products that they don’t want other platforms to be able to use (without their own decision to port them). In the long run, having a base .Net implementation means less work to get Office and other applications to run than say WINE or other attempts at implementing Win32, but it doesn’t mean that you won’t have to do anything at all to get them to work.
On the other hand, if a developer wants something to work cross-platform, all they have to do is use the base .Net framework, and, at the least, their porting work is minimal (if any), just as it is with Java (which is why I agree with MS’ extensions to Java, but that’s another story).