Mircosoft considered dropping Mac Office to hurt Apple

M

Overly Critical Guy writes to mention that more documents in the Iowa antitrust case have come out. This time, it's revealed that Microsoft considered dumping the Mac Office Suite entirely in a move to harm Apple. "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. It describes dumping development of the product as: 'The strongest bargaining point we have, as doing so will do a great deal of harm to Apple immediately.' The document also confirms that Microsoft at the time saw Office for the Mac as a chance to test new features in the product before they appeared in Windows, 'because it is so much less critical to our business than Windows.'"

source - *apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/05/2129253

That thread is really funny. Some good comments in there...

"If they really wanted to harm Apple and it's users, they'd port Clippy to Office:Mac and enable it by default."

Apple said it won't release a version of iTunes compatible with Vista
Now Microsoft is just returning the favour

techtronic said:
Apple said it won't release a version of iTunes compatible with Vista
Now Microsoft is just returning the favour

Apple just released a newer version of iTunes to make it better compatible with vista, and they are working with MS to improve the compatibilities and sort out the issues.

If they do not make a version compatible with Vista, first of all, they will lose quite a reputation, and all that they will find is people moving to the small and free 3rd party iPod managers; which if they do not work fluently with iPod, it would only hurt iPods reputation amongst the non geeks!!

techtronic said:
Apple said it won't release a version of iTunes compatible with Vista
Now Microsoft is just returning the favour

Uh... actually, this took place in 1997. Microsoft wouldn't dare to stop development on Office for Mac now that Apple's market share is on the rise.

I think they should do it. Whats the point, Apple & Mac users know that they need Microsoft to survive there 4% market share, yet they curse them & ***** them. Besides....Mac is hardly social & used in corporate enviroment. It's mostly single user centric or more like one Computer in a home. For such scenario OpenOffice.org is good enough, why pay or pirate for Office 2007

I used a iMac core duo recently in Planet M here, it had Apple works installed, again it reminded me of Office XP in features, it would be better if MS just takes away MSN & Office support from Mac, let them steal more of open Source like Apple always does

Yeah, I am sure Microsoft is a bunch of fools when it comes to business acumen. They should consider taking advice from our genius here!

You used an iMac! Yeah, sure. I believe you.

@sourav
buddy what u wanna a bankrupted Apple

if MS doesn't support apple the only product of their survival(ipod) lost also does company

@piyush gupta
If you could at least tell me which language you are using, I can at least use a translator to try to understand it!

^^whom r u talking to please mention username(sorry if its a spam

)

I have edited it though it is pretty obvious. And it is an accepted fact that if you do not specifically mention anyone, you are replying to the previous post.

Plus, I can see only one post that is posted in some other language.

I feel its in english

google "english" to know more about this language

Microsoft+Apple
perfect recipe for a thread to contain heated posts...
coming onto the topic..
Microsoft will not gain nething but revenge by doing so...but mac users will definitely miss something good...

^very true

I use OpenOffice.org 2.1 for word processing and spreadsheets, and Keynote 3 for building presentations. So, there's no need for M$ office on my mac.

nepcker said:
I use OpenOffice.org 2.1 for word processing and spreadsheets, and Keynote 3 for building presentations. So, there's no need for M$ office on my mac.

See, like I said, MS Office is not even required on MacOS X. Macs are highly single user centric & for such use OpenOffice.org which is also free is really good enough. Who needs colloboration in such enviroment.

M

gx_saurav said:
See, like I said, MS Office is not even required on MacOS X. Macs are highly single user centric & for such use OpenOffice.org which is also free is really good enough. Who needs colloboration in such enviroment.

Those who need to show the documents created in Office to others like say if I have to prepare a slide show for presentation, I will use Oo.org Impress but when you open the file in MS Office, you will find a nice wobbly piece of unknown material that you thought was your presentation.
All this thanks to the closed source of MS office.

gx_saurav said:
See, like I said, MS Office is not even required on MacOS X. Macs are highly single user centric & for such use OpenOffice.org which is also free is really good enough. Who needs colloboration in such enviroment.

Unfortunately, Microsoft does not think like you do. They've actually got people who know what they do, and they pay them damn well for it.

They've acknowledged that the Mac BU brings them nice profits, and in 2006, they signed an agreement to develop Office for OS X for at least 5 more years.

What you say is your opinion, which is frankly irrelevant.

tech_your_future said:
Those who need to show the documents created in Office to others like say if I have to prepare a slide show for presentation, I will use Oo.org Impress but when you open the file in MS Office, you will find a nice wobbly piece of unknown material that you thought was your presentation.
All this thanks to the closed source of MS office.

Hehe..thats what is monopoly

tech_your_future said:
Those who need to show the documents created in Office to others like say if I have to prepare a slide show for presentation, I will use Oo.org Impress but when you open the file in MS Office, you will find a nice wobbly piece of unknown material that you thought was your presentation.
All this thanks to the closed source of MS office.

Its time to read a bit Also, OpenOffice must be having a standalone presentation format, u know like making an EXE which runs everywhere or something like that. Its available in Powerpoint already

The reason I said to discontinue office for Mac is that Apple downplayes what it needs to survive. Besides, I m not wrong when i say you don't need Office (Windows or Mac) in a single user enviroment. OpenOffice is enough.

In my case I only use Outlook & Word 2007, so I can easily live with OpenOffice.org Writer & Outlook 2007 (standalone).

Apple downplays Windows, not Office.

And I need not mention that Windows deserves every bit of negative criticism it receives, whether it be from Apple, Scott Finnie, Jim Allchin or the U.S. Government.

The office suite is the only thing Microsoft is good at, though Keynote is far superior to Powerpoint.

@gx: Btw, don't compare Apple Works with Office. Try Pages + Keynote of iWork and then talk...

Pages - You work based on a few templates only. Let me know if u can make a document or DTP work like u can do in Word 2003\2007

Keynote - Ya right, compared to powerpoint its very low in power & features

I admit that Word is much more powerful when compared to Pages but Keynote is the best presentation software in the world. Even a newbie like me can make a slicker presentation in Keynote than an expert in Powerpoint. Look at Vista's feature presentation by Microsoft and the presentation at Macworld, 2007.

If you had seen how much my dad cursed MS Word when he made the mistake of publish an entire set of 6 books in Word, you can be certain that Word is not meant to be a Layout design. Its a great word processor though. But if you need to go "designing" anything, I'd say stick to InDesign or better still Pagemaker 7. Nothing can beat those two...(sad that Adobe stopped Pagemaker).

As for pages, it takes care of most of my daily needs (doing a 200 page project report for a client to be submitted to the Supreme Court of India...Got that? And the client is reeeeaaaaaly satisfied with the current results....)

But the client needs to have a Mac too.