Posted by Ben C on 01/30/08 21:43

On 2008-01-30, Toby A Inkster <usenet200801@tobyinkster.co.uk> wrote:
> 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

That's much harder than making a browser based on KHTML though. For
HTML/CSS/JS there are open standards and specifications. For Office
software you'd have to reverse-engineer MS Office as quickly as they add
new features to it.

OpenOffice is a fine product if you like that kind of thing, but it
isn't as interoperable with MS Office as many people need, and it would
be hard to achieve that.

Macs seem to be quite popular as home computers. They're more
fashionable-looking, usually less noisy, get infested with viruses less,
and people associate PCs with work. You don't need Office software at
home much anyway, so I think people would still buy them.

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