What does that mean, seriously? The Mac version is dead in the water, what?

I say dead. I say Microsoft is tired of listening to how darling Apple is, and they want to turn the clock back to a time when Office was the third-leg of your day.

Steve Ballmer is sick and tired of fielding questions about Apple products. He wants to stomp Apple so badly, but the EU is watching.

Come October, it will be the Europeans (the Brits and the Aussie Mac users) to cry foul first and demand equity and the Union is listening.

Mac users are going to do what they’ve always done. What ever.

My ML control panel for iCloud hasn’t changed since Lion. So all your whining is a bit chicken little.

Add arrogant and obnoxious and he has you pegged.

PaP, your a WWIC.

Clean out your tinfoil hat, I think you’re getting some interference.

——RM

I doubt seriously that Office:Mac is going anywhere.

As the owner of both iWork and Office, I assure you that Apple has serious work to do and we all saw that train wreck that was iWork.com.

We create a lot of stuff but we can’t put it away until we give it a name. In thirty-years, I’ve seen all manner of filing systems but it would seem the most popular filing system is to just put it on the desktop.

Microsoft will offer the cloud service at the end of October that works exclusively with Office. Mac users won’t be getting Office because Microsoft doesn’t care anymore and Jobs is dead, so all bets are off.

There will be two major camps for productivity, which side are you on?

Apple is going to take away our access to our own files? Paranoid much?

Contacts
Calendars & Reminders
Notes
Safari
Photo Stream
Documents & Data
Back to My Mac
Find My Mac

So why are you getting all worked up?

Are you jumping up and down as you yell that last part?

Fisher-Price? Really?

Your DOCUMENTS folder in the HOME folder may very well be synchronized with iCloud, but we are notorious for being contrary. We create folders everywhere, containing everything, and we don’t back up!

Microsoft’s Office 365 will provide an alternative to iCloud. Go over there if you don’t like the direction Apple is going.

I happen to like what they did for my music library. If that same process is the focal point of documents then I’m interested in a dialogue with Apple. The only thing standing between you and Apple is the developers and since you are neither, all you do is create a climate of fear. It’s in your goddamn name!

Microsoft is getting ready to unleash subscription-based Office for a billion people and they already have 60-million default subscribers who will be the guinea pigs for what will prove to be the tech world’s biggest PR disaster.

Windows 8 will coincide with the Office 365 release, causing major confusion in the market. Surface and ARM and Touch and Stylus and documents and markup and subscriptions is going to make for a extremely busy support system.

Ambitious? You ain’t seen nothing yet. Microsoft is going to drag its consumers kicking and screaming into the world of Touch. In fact, I’ll wager that twenty-percent of its consumers who believe the big blue E is the internet will also think they’re going to be getting Touch capability when they buy Windows 8!

I think most of us here are in the right camp. You, not so much. You denigrate Apple, but you offer no solutions of your own. In other words, your on your own and it sounds like your not having any fun.

Go AAPL!

I believe your analysis is based on a static view of the world. The capacity of the internet can grow very rapidly in a short period if there is a demand for it (and a profit to be earned by service providers). The very rapid buildout of web infrastructure 10-15 years ago proves that.

The question is how USERS want to manage their data. Locally, or in the cloud?

To date, those supporting the iCloud have not explained the advantages of their technology in a persuasive way or provided an operating system that integrates it. Let’s hope Mountain Lion accomplishes that.

Apple wants you to not only be hooked on its devices, but hooked on iCloud (for which you need Apple devices). That way you become hooked/dependent upon the Apple system, unless your want to make a wholesale change in how you store/access information (we’re talking 10 years down the road here).

iCloud isn’t a money-generating service. It’s the final connector to getting people to buy iPhones, iPods, iPads, AppleTVs and Macs so everything is integrated and your data is accessible from anywhere.

It’s quite good and very fast.

comparing email service and iCloud is akin to comparing bananas and oranges. smart users choose to manage security-critical email by locally storing it and locally encrypting it BEFORE it gets sent onto the internets. data protection is serious business, especially when you’re handling client data.

clouds just promise you that all will be well, your friendly overlord will encrypt things and securely store them for you, trust him. Just go ahead and hand it over, the magic of computing will do it all. I don’t buy it.

Of course Apple will tell you that with some arcane keystroke combination unlisted in any manual you can regain what was previously included in the OS through the GUI. Kind of like Apple’s BS Firewall- lamed up and dumbed down a couple of years ago.

There is a happy medium between all CLI and a iOS prison for the terminally inept.

Of course there are alternatives and ways around it, but Apple is setting up it’s base to be milked like a cow.

Store on a HD- you own your data. Store on the cloud- someone else owns your data.

The direction Apple is moving is essentially a thin client model dependent upon iCloud or other service as a file host. More iOS-ification BS. Apple is taking the best desktop OS ever developed and turning it into a Fisher-Price version for the terminally stupid, clueless and lazy.

Note the term ‘incrementally’.

I’m sure Apple would love to be all things to all people, but in this new world there is no doubt where the growth, and their future, lies.

So, PAP, what you want, sadly, don’t amount to a hill o’ beans.

While I like that Apple tries to make things simple, sometimes we want to keep things complex but straight forward.

I like to keep things in file folders because I tend to use off the wall file names and do not list properties to help find stuff. I keep things where they belong. So I have tons of folders on the desk top…. cause that is where I work. So keeping the old format as an option makes sense.
But..
We do not complain about a Hard drive that is not openable to repair the drive head???? So I think there are things that need to be simplified. Like the battery not being user repairable in the new MPB retina . You swap out the cover and battery at the Apple store. Its quick and easy. Apple swaps out the battery at the factory with a cleaned cover and puts the whole assembly back in stock.

Some things do not make sense….. But I will say that overall, Apple has been pretty good about doing it right.

Then go to http://www.mailsteward.com

Free version can hold up to 15,000 emails and in the SQL database you can do elaborate searches not possible in Mail and keep the attachments available too.

But; when you have large projects with dozens or hundreds of files in a dozen formats, you want a project centered system.

Creating a file in one application may need data from 6 other applications & Windows apps in order to get the number data, images, research articles, US Gov data, etc.

Then archiving &/or transporting all those files for the project means having them all in one spot.

Different people, different strokes.

Apple should just buy Path Finder and clean it up as the Finder of the future. I like their approach a lot except for the fact that it is not a true Finder replacement. It certainly packs the tools that power users crave while allowing for much more flexibility than the current Apple offering.

I would say thought that I would LOVE emails to be discoverable and searchable by more than the email application.