I Am Pariah: "Apple Going For The Jugular… And Cutting Its Own Throat"

[Jason Dunn]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.iampariah.com/blog/archives/000349.html' target='_blank'>http://www.iampariah.com/blog/archives/000349.html</a><br /><br /></div>"Apple is aggressively trying to break what it considers a dependence on software developers like Microsoft, Adobe, Quark, and others. Microsoft Office has been the only serious productivity suite for over a decade now. Office’s constituent apps—Word, Excel, PowerPoint—all enjoy better than 95% market share. There is no serious competition. Whether WordPerfect is better than Word or the late Adobe Persuasion was better than PowerPoint is a moot discussion; Microsoft won and owns the office productivity market on both Windows and Mac platforms."<br /><br />Never having owned a Mac, I found this article to be a fascinating look at the state of Apple and it's platform. I find platform "soap operas" very interesting, and until reading this article I didn't fully understand the motivation behind Apple's move to develop so many applications in-house. This article might make some Mac users go berserk, but if you keep an open mind I think you'll find it's quite logical and balanced (at least from my point of view). It's a bit long, but worth the read!

[Mr. MacinTiger]

Although there are some factual errors (Keynote never was free and the guy has completely forgotton about Avid as a video editor), I cannot argue with his positions. It's clear Apple and Jobs feel it is important to lock out 3rd party folks from some areas of software. While I cheer this in some respects (Adobe needs to be humbled somewhat heh heh heh), I mostly am unsure about what the heck the good is in doing this. Apple's attempt for "software monopoly" has really hurt some of the small developers, like the ones who make the excellent program Watson. And, the have suceeded in ticking off some of the bigger guys like Adobe and Microsoft who Apple really needs to reach a broader market.

At this point though, I am willing to still trust Steve Jobs and hopefully he has a good strategy going.

PS I'm still supporting the 3rd party folks...My preorder is in for Office X 2004 right now and I am psyched about getting my hands on it. I feel like the MS Mac BU has some really sharp people (despite the lackluster Mac X releases of Messenger and WMP)!