…in reducing its dependence on that one and only productivity suite that so many of us, rightly or wrongly, feel wemusthave: MS Office.
First, there were the rumblings from MS about Apple’s vagueness and general lack of enthusiasm around the issue of .NET support on the Mac. Then there were more rumblings from MS about the lackluster sales of Office v.X, which seemed to some like MS was just looking for a reason to drop Mac support in Office. But then Apple returned fire by announcing iCal, iSync, and an agressively improved version of Mail.app at the recent MWNY. This suite of apps is so clearly aimed at replacing Entourage that anyone savvy enough to read the writing on the wall has been waiting to see what Apple would trundle out to aim at Word, Powerpoint, and Excel. My suspicion was that they’d forget about AppleWorks and announce an investment of some sort in OpenOffice, and to my pleasant non-surprise I wandered into the Mach Ach this evening to find this thread sitting near the top of the front page:Apple + Sun vs. Microsoft.(In case you don’t know, the Mach Ach is one of the best sources of Apple news on the ‘net, especially for those of us who don’t care to hear about every point release of every popular Mac app.) It appears thatApple is giving Sun a handwith a Java-based port of OpenOffice for OS X. (I would say “I told you so,” but I didn’t actually tell anyone so. I just sort of thought it to myself, on the inside, in my own brain, silently.)
