“As Apple Computer Inc. enjoys rebounding popularity among computer users rejecting the dominance of Microsoft Corp., one of the biggest beneficiaries is — oddly enough — likely to be Microsoft,” Terril Yue Jones writes for The Los Angeles Times. “That’s because outside of Apple itself, Microsoft sells more software for Apple’s flagship Macintosh computers than any other company. With sales of Macintosh machines rising sharply, archrival Microsoft stands to bolster its long-standing business selling Office and other programs for Mac.”
“‘We’re ecumenical people,’ said Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates. ‘We have to run everything. Our first graphics interface was on the Macintosh. We’ve always done well on Macs.’ Microsoft executives declined to discuss just how well, and the company does not break Mac sales out in its financial reports. But Microsoft’s Mac offerings are routinely credited as being more innovative, elegant and robust than its mainline PC products,” Jones writes. “Although Apple and Microsoft were founded within months of each other at the dawn of the PC age, the global share of computers running Apple’s Macintosh operating system has been squeezed to only around 2% of PCs today, down from a peak of 9.6%.”
“Because it serves a different universe of PCs than those that run Windows the Mac BU isn’t tied to releases of Office for Windows and operates on its own schedule. That means that Office 2004, which is for Macs, has features not available in Office 2003, the latest edition available for Windows PCs,” Jones writes. “Both Mac and Win versions, for instance, introduced a function that allows users to record a conversation or lecture onto a PC while taking notes. The Mac BU built that capability into Word, so it comes built into Office 2004. But the Windows team made the function work only with the purchase of the $99 program “One Note,” and even then files aren’t created as Word documents.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: Apple’s AppleWorks provides Microsoft Word and Excel compatibility and Apple’s Keynote (part of iWork) imports and exports Microsoft PowerPoint presentations. Apple’s Pages (also part of iWork) also imports and exports Microsoft Word documents. And Apple’s Filemaker also imports Microsoft Excel files and Access data and instantly converts Microsoft Excel files to FileMaker databases.
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