| Monday, June 17, 2002 |
15:37 - The Future of Office
|
(top)  |
A few more comments on the Mac Business Unit and the relationship between Microsoft and Apple have been submitted by reader Paul S. Linsay:
So what if MS stops developing for the Mac! A little background. A friend of mine used to administer about 2000 PC's for a large insurance company, he now does the same for a large pharmaceutical manufacturer. Know what operating systems they use? Not WinXP, not Win2K, not even Win98, they use Win95. Because it is so damn hard to administer so many Windows boxes and the problems of upgrading systems are so monumental they are literally afraid to upgrade operating systems. Do you think they are running the latest and greatest Office suite on those boxes, nope. Know what the gold standard in MSWord documents is? Hold your breath: Word5, written how long ago? My wife worked for AT&T for several years. If you wanted to be sure that your docs an memos got read, it had to be Word5 or you were sure to lose some people. Given all this, most corporate types are way behind the curve on the latest and greatest in Office. Face it, how many people even use more than 5 or 10% of the features available? As long as you can read Word5 docs, it's probably not going to matter to 99% of the population.
I hadn't really thought of that, but it's likely true. Even if this very day, Office were to bifurcate irreparably, the Windows version going one way and the Mac version going another or even being discontinued-- it's not like that would make every existing, earlier copy of Office for either platform suddenly vaporize. (Well, maybe if they get everybody using phone-home software that's licensed by subscription... but again, earlier versions won't have that problem either.) Right now, there's parity at the Office XP/v.X level, and that's pretty damned powerful-- there's probably not a whole lot more in the killer-feature column that Microsoft could add to a Windows-only version of Office to help differentiate it, if they were interested in actively crippling the Mac version; if they had any such ideas, they've had some fifteen years now to add them. Office is at its peak of developmental maturity, and without Microsoft materially altering Office's mandate (like, say, by adding a Photoshop-like image editing program, or a PageMaker-like layout application), the state of the art for word processing and spreadsheets isn't going to advance much further. So even in the (I think) unlikely event that Microsoft "goes limp" and deflates support for the Mac version of Office, the world will still be standardized on nothing more recent than what's currently out there, with feature parity across platforms.
Also:
Just how sophisticated does a word processor/spreadsheet/presentation program have to be? After a while it's irrelevant as long as it's possible to exchange docs with other people. So long as MS is required to maintain backward compatibility with its own earlier versions, this is not the big deal people think it is.
And, the judge in the nine state's suit against MS, just threw out MS's latest arguments, so it may still be possible that MS has to divest Office per the states' request...!
Indeed. And that's something I've been fiddling with in my brain for a while now: What if, as antitrust punishment, Microsoft were forced to sign legal agreements to open the file-format standard for Word and Excel and the like, so that any company could write 100% compliant files, like with HTML? The only thing keeping companies like Apple and Corel and WordPerfect from writing applications that match Word feature-for-feature is the inability to guarantee file-format compatibility-- and the fear that if they're seen as infringing too closely upon Microsoft's monopoly, Microsoft will just make a gratuitous change to the file format to make them instantly incompatible. (They've done this twice in the past.) But if they were legally thwarted from doing that, and it was required of them that they make the Office formats into published, open specifications á la HTML, then it would cease to be a club for them to use in platform-monopoly games. Linux could have a true Word-workalike. Apple could write a pro-level companion to AppleWorks with all the features of Office-- and sending Word and Excel and PowerPoint documents around the office would become no more an issue of compatibility than writing a web page for multiple browsers. (Yes, iffy example-- browsers aren't known for being perfectly identical. But that's just a real-world implementation detail.)
And there's nothing Microsoft could do about it.
Isn't it about time we recognized that word-processing and spreadsheets are a fundamental part of computing-- every bit as much so as web browsing is? And by that token, shouldn't Word and Excel be granted the status of "public utility" that their de facto standard nature has earned them? Nobody makes money from the use of HTML or JPEG or PNG or ASCII text; even Photoshop PSD is a publicly writable standard now. (The reason Adobe doesn't fear competition is that it's bloody hard to write a Photoshop-level image editing program.) Shouldn't Office be placed on the same model as Photoshop is already?
Windows users can already open Word files in WordPad, even if they don't have Office. A thin, invisible wall prevents the same functionality from being available to all other platforms, and for application writers on those other platforms to be able to match Office feature-for-feature. If the States can't force Microsoft to divest Office, then it's time to declaw the Office Weapon by opening up the file-format standard. Then we wouldn't have to have anything more to do with Microsoft, or any further interest in Apple's maintaining good public relations with them, than if we found a huge, easily accessible, unquenchable source of oil or alternative fuel that rendered Saudi control of the oil fields irrelevant to us. Think of the problems that that would solve.
|
|
