“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 $99 program “One Note,” and even then files aren’t created as Word documents.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: Apple’s AppleWorks provides Microsoft Word and Excel compatibility and Apple’s Keynote (part of iWork) imports and exports Microsoft PowerPoint presentations. Apple’s Pages (also part of iWork) also imports and exports Microsoft Word documents. And Apple’s Filemaker also imports Microsoft Excel files and Access data and instantly converts Microsoft Excel files to FileMaker databases.
Related articles:
More would switch from Windows to Mac if Apple advertised more effectively – September 04, 2005
Mac users should not buy Microsoft software (or hardware) – May 16, 2003
Roland WOW! Where do I sign up I want to be a “member”
MW = member
I have never given M$ a red cent, and never will, I have NeoOffice/J loaded on my Mac, and I seldom need that. Pity that stuff like Excel started as Mac products and got scooped up, like lots of stuff to end up, in some cases, windoze only.
MW= left
as in, attention, Sanity has “left’ the building.
Big deal. Mac sales may help MS a little by giving them more Office customers but it’s an important transitional step in getting people out from under their thumb, like quitting cigarettes but using the patch to wean yourself off.
And if ever a software package needed some digital liposuction, it’s that corpulent catastrophe MS Office. Word has more useless features than useful ones at this point.
Cant stand MS products nor would I buy one…..never used ANY MS products. I use FrameMaker (still works fine in Tiger) and documents are cross platform, iLife, iWork, Thinkfree, Acrobat, Appleworks, and databases FileMaker, OMNIS 7 (work & personal use)….never had a virus, worm, whatever…. I guess I haven’t missed anything. If I need interoperability, I create PDF’s.
MW “office”: as in MS Office, something I’d never buy or use
Ignatius, I’ve never tried Keynote, but I will. I use Macs at home and an IBM PC at work. Thanks
Right on dbarrycoyle!
Numbers, numbers:
2% market share – just what does this mean?
This is actually quarterly ratings not actual user base figures. Actual user base figures would actually show the Mac seats at 15% +.
You need to buy 3 Wintel boxes for every Mac unit don’t you?
If we were to break it down:
– DOS boxes
– Win 3.1
– Win 95
– Win 98
– ME
– NT
– on and on
I haven’t seen the numbers for a while but I would be curious to see how many of these old dinosaurs are still out there in use that truly depicts market share.
Time to expose the real numbers?
Roland… a few tips
Personaly I don’t have anything on my computer that could compromise me in any way. I don’t use mail (just hotmail or other web based emails ) and i don’t keep any friends information on my computer ie address books.
I don’t have a netbank account (Netbank in Australia, I’m sure there’s something similar in other parts of the world). I don’t keep credit card details on my computer. I delete cookies, cache etc everytime i close down a browser. I have alias’s set up so they can be easily found.
There are many ways you can shield yourself from Big B. Not totaly of course unless you want to not have a, computer, credit card, mobile phone or any other trackable device.
If somebody hacks or takes control of my computer they are welcome. The minute I find out I’ll be shuting down and preparing for a complete reinstall. Not an archive install, because i want to keep network settings and all that crap. I’ll be doing a COMPLETE reinstall and setting it all up again from scratch. No big deal a couple of days work. I have yet to see a virus that can seriously physicaly harm a computer.
I know a lot of this is just baid-aid solutions and if BB realy wants to find out about you they can but chill, you and i are 2 of 6 billion people out there (or is that more like 5.5 billion these days ??) I’m sure they’ll find someone more interesting or important to pick on.
Just goes to show that M$ can produce good stuff when they want to – lets hope Windows benefits as well.
This is questionable to me. I think Adobe is second, not MS, and what are the “and other programs for Mac” they mention? Besides Office, what is there? Bogus article for many reasons.
Let it be, m$ is a sotftware-maker ! It is Apple Macintosh’s superb hard- and software that makes the combination so nice, what does it matter when m$ sells good Office4mac software ?
Open Office is free and multi platform, Mac, Linux, Sun and Windows.
And it’s totally free, even for commercial use.
And it is pretty good, supports all MS Office formats, and uses Open Standards by default.
http://www.openoffice.org
http://www.openoffice.org
http://www.openoffice.org
http://www.openoffice.org
http://www.openoffice.org
http://www.openoffice.org
http://www.openoffice.org
Where on the FileMaker website do I find info on importing Access data as mentioned by MDN? Or, does MDN simply mean converting Access to CSV or some other format first and then importing it? The FileMaker website specifically mentions Excel, but I have not found the word “Access” there.
Roland,
I will confirm Apple and even Google have made “Stealth” connection attempts to my computer.
I think it had to do with a porn email I recieved that promised kiddie porn. I was so enraged I visited the site to get the URL to report it.
Turned out it was suspended and next thing I know my machine is being attacked. Either it was a honey pot or the good guys were trying to get the bad guys. Either case I was caught up in it and my firewall logs showed increase activity, Mac began to slow down.
Of those Stealth attacks, the IP’s of two of the attackers was Google and Apple.
After flicking my network setting on and off for about 15 minutes they gave up. But they were in my machine I’m almost sure of it.
I have no incriminating evidence, except some legal porn which is only embarrasing, but not illegal.
But your right Roland, your absolutely right.