“Last month I bought a shiny new Apple PowerBook to replace an ageing Windows laptop. It is faster, has a clearer screen, does a lot more and has much better battery life,” Bill Thompson writes for BBC News. “Because I use Outlook all of my precious e-mail is stored in what is called a PST file. It is a format that was created by Microsoft, is only understood properly by Microsoft, and is evidently carefully guarded by Microsoft.”
“Anyone with a suspicious mind would think that Microsoft wanted to make it hard for users to make the switch from Windows to Mac OS, and because they own the PST format they have decided to do this by failing to provide a migration tool,” Thompson writes. “…because the format is not published. And this makes it hard to get things to work.”
Thompson writes, “Microsoft benefits, even if the reason for the lack of migration tools is simply that the PST files are too complicated and messy to be easily converted to industry-standard mail files that can be read by other programs. I am technically literate, and yet I am finding it hard to get rid of my Windows laptop. Someone less confident than me would probably have given up by now, or simply been deterred by the prospect of having to mess around with migration tools.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Microsoft guarding a proprietary format to keep users locked on Windows? Say it ain’t so!
Little Machines’ US$10 “Outlook2Mac” has worked for us in the past for moving Windows Outlook email, contacts, and calendar appointments from Windows PCs to Macs. More info here.