| Saturday, July 27, 2002 |
16:57 - And in today's Office news...
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-946714.html
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Wow, I almost slept through the big Office-ish announcement that seems to have broken like the wind over the wires today.
(First of all, though-- I have to comment on this URL. Okay, so CNet got the "news.com" domain-- that's fine, good for them. But they also apparently acquired "com.com", just so they could do all their internal linking in the form "news.com.com". Why the hell? This makes no sense to me. What, the more "coms", the more credible the news source? I can't help but think of that Jack Handey quote:
If you want to impress someone with your computer knowledge, just add "dot com" to the end of everything you say, dot com.
...Dot com.)
So on with the show. Apparently, Sun has found a friend in Apple, and the common ground is StarOffice (or, more specifically, OpenOffice-- the open-source version of it). Though there had already been a version of OpenOffice for OS X in the works, now apparently Apple and Sun will both be working on it.
The partnership is expected to produce a Java-based version of OpenOffice by the end of the year, followed by a commercial StarOffice release sometime in 2003.
"I think you can see OpenOffice running solid on OS X by the end of this calendar year," said Tony Siress, Sun's senior director of desktop marketing solutions.
Until now, Sun did not plan a version of StarOffice for OS X, although the Microsoft Office competitor is available for Linux, Solaris and Windows. An open-source version of the software, called OpenOffice, had already been planned for OS X. OpenOffice.org released a developer build of the product on Thursday.
Java would seem to be bad news. It's my understanding that you can write Cocoa apps in Java, and even compile them into fast-opening standalone executables as with any other langauge (technically, you can compile Perl code into a platform-dependent executable; it'll no longer be cross-platform, but it will run faster and won't require the Perl interpreter). And there's been all kinds of hype over the past year and a half from people like Sun and O'Reilly that the JVM in OS X is faster than on any other platform (and the only Java 2.0 JVM out there), but that seems to ignore the fact that it's faster by a huge margin (at least in my experience) in Windows. Maybe they're shunning it because Windows' JVM, having been privatized and optimized for Windows by Microsoft in what spawned all those inconclusive court battles with Sun, is no longer what they refer to as "Java".
But in any case, Java has always given me bad vibes as an application platform. LimeWire, a Java-based Gnutella client for OS X, is an ugly ugly port that's laid out like a Windows app (with menus in the window instead of in the OS menu bar) and has some of the most sluggish performance and most hideous widgets known to man. ThinkFree Office, the $50 office package mentioned in the story, is (in Marcus' words) "ass"; and OS X's own System Preferences used to be written in Java, but they were terrifically slow until Apple rewrote them in pure Cocoa. So while Java itself doesn't necessarily make for a bad app, it sure seems to pave the way for one. So the "commercial StarOffice release" would probably have to involve some rewriting into pure Cocoa, if just for performance's sake. (Sun won't like that, though. But, you know, tough.)
And besides, the decision to back OpenOffice seems a strange one to me. What does it bring to bear that Apple couldn't just do on its own? It's been three or four years since I used OpenOffice, but at the time it was a UI nightmare; text handling was godawful, the widget set was an unusable monstrosity, and I couldn't find anything in any of the menus (much less explore the feature set to see if it in fact had any equivalence to MS Office). Maybe it's gotten a lot better since then. But still, why?
Apple has AppleWorks. Why couldn't they just dump a bunch of engineers onto it and soup that up? It's not a huge mystery which features need to be added to it to make it into an Office-killer. They can't be that hard to add-- this is a word processing program and a spreadsheet, for God's sake. The oldest applications in home computing. You'd think twenty years of experience would have made such apps second nature to software engineers by now, wouldn't you? Our fifth lab assignment in CS1 was to write a GUI spreadsheet application in C. Mine was pretty spiffy, if I do say so myself. And that with five weeks of C experience to my name.
If Apple is really serious about writing a killer office suite, it seems to me they could stand to act the part. AppleWorks has never seemed much of a showpiece. It's an embarrassment, to be honest. It's clumsy, shoddy, buggy, and they didn't even write it themselves-- they acquired it from Claris (the company Apple had originally spun off as an application-maker) when that company consolidated around FileMaker. And Apple doesn't seem to have done much work on it since then. The vertical scrollbar still doesn't do live scrolling, for crying-out-loud. It gets the fundamentals of typing and calculating done, but it feels like if you scratched the skin off it, there'd be nothing but bone underneath. It has a long way to go to become a full-fledged Office suite.
So is Apple just punting it and throwing in their chips with Sun? The two companies have seemed to have a fairly warm relationship lately-- Xserve competitive marketing notwithstanding, Jobs and McNealy seem to be going into one of those Ellison-esque "enemy of your enemy is my friend" coalitions against Gates. Now that the world has squarely divided into Windows vs. UNIX, all the UNIX vendors seem to be putting aside any differences and scrambling to find common ground and reason to cooperate, because otherwise they read doom in the tea.
It seems clear that Apple definitely wants out from under the Office Sword that has been hanging over them for their entire bloody existence. It's frightening to think just how similar things are today to how they were in 1985, when Microsoft made Apple drop the lawsuit against them (which Apple had brought on charges that Microsoft had reverse-engineered Apple's application development kit, which they'd given Microsoft in order to make Word and Excel for the Mac, and turned it into Windows 1.0-- charges which were turning out to be true, especially looking at the identical function names in the code... but then Microsoft played the we'll-cancel-Mac-Office card, and everything came screeching to a halt). Or to 1997, when Steve Jobs decided to bundle Netscape on the Mac OS desktop instead of IE, and received a phone call from Gates asking politely how they should go about announcing the cancellation of Office for the Mac. Or just a couple of weeks ago, when lackluster sales of Office v.X (which they should have expected, considering that v.X is X-only, and the transition to OS X is far from complete) prompted the MS MacBU to start harrumphing about "reevaluating our future commitment to this project" and for its leader to be sent on a leave of absence, presumably to catalog the mating habits of the nine-spined stickleback off Baffin Island.
So now it's clear that Apple wants a contingency plan, even if the act of creating one means it will immediately become necessary to put it into action.
Granted, it might be refreshing to imagine what life on the Mac would be like without having to worry about Microsoft. Sort of like imagining a world where the US didn't have to depend on Middle Eastern oil. But if MS had no more investment in the Mac platform, can you imagine the FUD campaign they would start? Can you imagine what ads they would run? Is there any hope that Apple would survive against the kinds of nasty tricks Microsoft would be free to pull if they didn't have to share in the consequences?
And besides, what sells Macs right now is the fact that you can buy Microsoft Office for it. Not "some other office program that's almost as good", or even one that's demonstrably better. People don't care. Last weekend, when I was in the Apple Store, a walk-in customer was asking a sales guy whether he could run MS Office on a Mac. The guy mentioned AppleWorks, which he said has Office file-format compatibility, and when the customer looked uncomfortable, he then pointed to the v.X boxes. But I was running through an alternate-reality in my head, one where the salesman shuffled his feet and said, "Well, we have AppleWorks, which has Office file-format compatibility, at least with Office files up to 2002, after which they changed the format... and you can also get this other office package, which is just like MS Office and has all the same feat-- hey! Wait! Come back!"
So I applaud Apple's balls, but something tells me balls aren't going to be enough to see them through this gamble. Apple needs to be able to keep in a handclasp with Microsoft, if only so they can keep MS at arm's length. It's a sucky kind of symbiosis, and it's been an uneasy twenty years, full of tantrums on Microsoft's part and petulant threats to take their ball and go home. But if the Harry Potter books have taught me anything, it's that no matter how much everybody comes to loathe him and how discredited he might become, Draco Malfoy never fucking goes away.
I sure hope they know what they're doing.
Dot com.
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