[Ti] [OT] MS dropping Office for Mac

[Kulick [memeticsystems.com]]

If I may point out to you that right there is the biggest reason that
there are no "good" alternatives to Microsoft:

> > Why must an Office Suite have MICROSOFT on the box? As long as it is 

> > ****file compatible***** and does the job I think that is irrelevant.

Sure there are good attempts, I use OpenOffice, but it is not even close
to perfect and SLOW.  Did I mention SLOW?.  I am the jackass who sends
the office secretary emails saying, uh, can I have this as a plain text,
PDF, or HTML document?  Here is the acid test.  How many of you have
submitted your resumes in word format and how many of you as text?  I am
a unix monkey, vi is my editor, it is all have used or had cause to use
for 8 years with maybe some LaTex (for math formulas) or PDF thrown in
for color.  Bet you more than 3/4 of you cannot honestly say they use
plain text files for anything.

The primary reason that MS has dominated the office app market has quite
a bit to do with initially strong adoption rates assisted by a closed
binary format, but even more importantly because of inertia.

The .doc file is not a text file, it is binary and as long as it remains
binary everyone else has to reverse engineer it just to read it
(formating, etc).  Even more importantly you have to write the same
binary file back out so the rest of the world can read your alternative
format.

If MS releases Office 11 with using an XML file (assuming the rumors are
true), well then, everyone and their cousin is going to be able to
engineer an alternative, but most won't bother or care and simply
upgrade (thus the issue is not some much functionality, closed source or
open source, but inertia). It is not the "how" or "why" it is the "this
is what I used before" that keeps MS on top of the game.

My two cents and MHO, please flame accordingly.

-A