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: email@hidden
- Date: Thu, 7 Mar 2002 02:04:25 EST
Paul Berkowitz <email@hidden> writes:
>
(What sort of monopoly is MS supposed to have in Macintosh apps?)
At first, I though Paul's comments were a joke...
Well, we could start with word processors. Gee, there's MacWrite (nope,
killed when Claris split from Apple and turned into FileMaker Inc),
ClarisWorks (well, it's almost a fully capable word processor -- but it
doesn't have the features of even MacWrite Pro), WordPerfect (nope, killed on
the table by corel), MS Word (yeah, that's a MS app), and then there's the
bit players that are better suited as editors than as full-blown word
processors (Nisus, BBEdit, etc) and the page-layout apps (Quark Xpress,
PageMaker, InDesign). Either way, Word walks away with over 85% of the Mac
professional word processing market.
Spreadsheets? Hmmm... MS Excel, ClarisWorks (again, almost a full blown
spreadsheet app, except for all the limitations), and Lotus 1-2-3 for the Mac
(yes, it existed -- for 42 days before they killed it during the lotus-novell
merger; I have a shrink-wrapped copy and a matching 5' banner for anyone who
is so die-hard they would pay for it). Again, Excel retains almost all of the
professional spreadsheet market.
As for why microsoft supports MS Office for the Mac as a mac-platform-first
product, the truth is that they were blackmailed into it as a part of a
settlement offer (as well as the purchase of $150 million dollars of Apple
Stock without voting rights) for being caught having literally flinched some
1200+ lines of QuickTime code (inclusive of comments, which is what sealed
it).
[See
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-202143.html for settlement details].
The contract on that settlement offer runs out this August of this year
[see
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-843145.html ], by the way, and after
that, it's anyone's guess which way the wind will blow on any given quarter.
=-= Marc
_______________________________________________
applescript-users mailing list | email@hidden
Help/Unsubscribe/Archives:
http://www.lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/applescript-users
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.