Sorry if this CC goes to anyone that doesn't give a damn.
> >Even if you buy a Mac, the only general productivity
> >software available is MS Office. If that's not a monopoly, I don't
> know
> >what is.
>
> Back when I used Macs (and was in fact Apple Student Rep at Swarthmore),
> WriteNow and Nisus were both competitive word processors. But they
> didn't keep up (on feature and ease of use, respectively), and lost out
> to Office. One of the key arguments against saying that Microsoft
> applications dominate because they have "secret" access to the OS is
> that Microsoft has had a dominant share of the Mac market for over a
> decade, where Apple was clearly doing them no favors. If competitive
> word processors no longer exist, that's just a sign that the Mac
> applications market is so pathetic that no one is willing to write to it
> unless they can get majority share.
Well as a matter of fact I just got the new Nisus 5.1.2 tonight. It still
has wonderful features and in many ways is superior to Word 98. (Release
Version, I have that also)
As far as MS dominating on the Mac you have FileMaker, Nisus, Panorama,
some sort of Cassidy and Green spread sheet, Time Slips, and of course a
swell port of Quake. I do have Word/Excel on my Mac so I can read files I
receive from others.
If your going to argue about Ms Office on the Mac, the blame clearly rests
on Claris shoulders. They like most other Apple products had it right with
the XTND file translation technology, but let it wane and rot. The
translators are for the most part totally useless at this point. Trying to
open a file with them produces in almost all cases a fairly spectacular
crash.
Tim
--"The public wants what the public gets, but I don't want what society's got" - Paul Weller
<> tbyars@earthlink.net <>