IE, Bubbye(link)

Microsoft at one time was chasing share market with IE on the Mac and from memory on the SUN computers. Today, with the final withdrawal from what I feel is the "next big thing", then may have pulled the plug a bit too soon.

However, we have better choices and are better off without this one.

Bob

At one point there, IE for the Mac showed just what the Mac Business Unit over at Redmond could do when left to their own devices. MACIE5.0 was the best with full and proper support for HTML, support for CSS and was 100% compatible with it's Windows counterpart and still ran rings around it both in performance and appearance. Unfortunately, MS went off with the proprietary code and the whole thing slides from there.

So, moving right along......


P

Forgive my paranoia but could this be the begining of MS shifting support away from Apple altogether ? Yes, MS will always have an apple market for Office but with a merging of platform architecture that can run both OS the competition becomes tighter. Combine this with the reported simularities between OS 10.*.* and VISTA and Microsoft certainly can only benefit from distinguishing itself as the only OS to run certain programs. Can IE 6 be considered a "must have" program... Hardly... But what if MS has the next Killer Ap up its sleeve (or thinks so at least) with IE 7 ? What if it's designing its next browser to be integrated with pay per view downloads, streaming movies and music, and VOIP to top it off ? Integrated with Windows Media Player and it could take on iTunes and Quicktime. Heck, you can buy almost any DVD player off the shelf right now that will play Windows Media Files but not straight up Quicktime. Kodak picture CD playback was a selling point 5 years ago and now you hardly see the lable on any DVD player.

All I'm saying is that MS could leverage itself into some fat bank with an integrated comunications browser. Vista will certainly be an attempt to steal Apple Market share. Why not add to that the chance of becoming the media industries darling with an Ap that does it all ?

Just conjecture.

grim

...I don't think they'll pull support of major programs like Office. They can pull Windows Media Player though. Flip4Mac's WMV Player Pro is a much better alternative.

Anyway, too many creative professionals and the like use Office to interface with their Windows-using counterparts. It would be declaring war against Apple to cut S&D (support and development) of Office. What would happen next? M$ banning iTunes from Windows? Ha! I could only imagine the backlash and uproar. Music to my ears.

At the office we use... Open Office unless the user complains too much. Of course there are political downsides to incurring another 500 buck cost to the company.

Bob

While Open Office seems to be a good way to go, doesn't it depend on the openness(sp)(openness and MS in the same sentence!)of MS to enable it to work correctly. If MS decided to get nasty about the whole Office thing, couldn't they just change their file formats and not reveal that formatting to the outside world. Without knowing what the file format was, wouldn't that slow down the development of anything that attempted to be compatible with MS Office? Then the users of Non-MS Office would only achieve compatibility by saving in something generic like RTF.
Just a thought

P

See Massachusetts and it's mandate for open document formats.

Bob

since it's the best selling MS ap for apple... it's actually the only MS ap I can think of that mac enthusiasts might buy.

No, whether people want to think of the company this way or not, Apple is now an "entertainment" company in a way that the giants of the gaming platformers overlooked. While MS was trying to steal Sony's market, Apple created a whole new business idea on the bones of napster and the other P2P pirates. The music industry TALKED about doing it but got left in the dust because of their need for total control of pricing and all the other details. Apple has created the first pay per play system for the web that works. The only threat Apple might be to MS is in this arena and I can see the withdrawal of IE5 being the first step (albeit, only symbolic) in moving on apple's new market.

grim