Re: What sort of monopoly is MS supposed to have in Macintosh apps?
Re: What sort of monopoly is MS supposed to have in Macintosh apps?
- Subject: Re: What sort of monopoly is MS supposed to have in Macintosh apps?
- From: Paul Berkowitz <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 06 Mar 2002 23:16:37 -0800
On 3/6/02 11:04 PM, "email@hidden" <email@hidden> wrote:
>
Paul Berkowitz <email@hidden> writes:
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> (What sort of monopoly is MS supposed to have in Macintosh apps?)
>
>
At first, I though Paul's comments were a joke...
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>
Well, we could start with word processors. Gee, there's MacWrite (nope,
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killed when Claris split from Apple and turned into FileMaker Inc),
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ClarisWorks (well, it's almost a fully capable word processor -- but it
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doesn't have the features of even MacWrite Pro), WordPerfect (nope, killed on
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the table by corel), MS Word (yeah, that's a MS app), and then there's the
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bit players that are better suited as editors than as full-blown word
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processors (Nisus, BBEdit, etc) and the page-layout apps (Quark Xpress,
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PageMaker, InDesign). Either way, Word walks away with over 85% of the Mac
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professional word processing market.
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Spreadsheets? Hmmm... MS Excel, ClarisWorks (again, almost a full blown
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spreadsheet app, except for all the limitations), and Lotus 1-2-3 for the Mac
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(yes, it existed -- for 42 days before they killed it during the lotus-novell
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merger; I have a shrink-wrapped copy and a matching 5' banner for anyone who
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is so die-hard they would pay for it). Again, Excel retains almost all of the
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professional spreadsheet market.
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As for why microsoft supports MS Office for the Mac as a mac-platform-first
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product, the truth is that they were blackmailed into it as a part of a
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settlement offer (as well as the purchase of $150 million dollars of Apple
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Stock without voting rights) for being caught having literally flinched some
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1200+ lines of QuickTime code (inclusive of comments, which is what sealed
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it).
Somehow you seem to have forgotten AppleWorks, which comes installed on all
iMacs and iBooks and is good enough for most Mac users. It has both
spreadsheet and word processor, and other features. (Or is that what you
meant by "ClarisWorks"? When it was still called ClarisWorks, there were
other word processors for the Mac, such as Word Perfect, I think.) Word,
Excel and PowerPoint were all originally for the Mac (Word created by MS,
perhaps Excel too? PPT bought by MS) so it's not surprising that they had a
significant market share to begin with,
Nevertheless, MS (the Macintosh Business Unit, to be precise) themselves
have calculated that approximately 20% of Mac users have some version of
Office. The proportion who have AppleWorks must be far higher.
--
Paul Berkowitz
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