Posted by Toby A Inkster on 01/30/08 16:44

Travis Newbury wrote:

> Oh please, if Microsoft pulled Office from the Mac it would go the way
> the Amiga went.

2 or 3 years ago, I would have agreed. But Apple have started showing a
knack for taking an existing open source project, polishing it up and
creating a gem.

Look what they did when Microsoft seemed to be letting Internet Explorer
development on OSX slide: they took Konqueror's rendering engine, ported
it to Mac OS X, put some Aqua chrome around it and released it as Safari.
A few years down the line, Safari not only has close to 100% penetration
on Mac OS X, but it's now competing on Microsoft's home turf; WebKit (the
Safari rendering engine) has been improved so much that the Konqueror guys
are dropping their original engine in favour of it; and various Gecko-
based browsers (e.g. Epiphany) are thinking of going WebKit.

If Microsoft dropped Office for Mac, Apple could fork OpenOffice.org/
NeoOffice and have a decent suite within 6-12 months -- one that supported
Microsoft Office formats and was more at home on OS X, fitting in better
with the native look and feel, integrating with Apple Address Book,
Safari, etc.

Microsoft won't drop Office for Mac precisely because they're afraid of
that happening, and the inevitable Windows port (a la iTunes, Safari,
Bonjour, etc).

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
[Geek of HTML/SQL/Perl/PHP/Python/Apache/Linux]
[OS: Linux 2.6.17.14-mm-desktop-9mdvsmp, up 22:46.]

Looking Ahead to PHP 6
http://tobyinkster.co.uk/blog/2008/01/29/php6/

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