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Apple's office format
- Thread starter Vroem
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Originally posted by whfsdude
Seems kind of cool. Maybe it will be used when Apple redoes their appleworks suite
I hope they do this soon... it's about time.
but on the other hand, a superior office suite could kill MS development of Office for Mac (see Internet Explorer). and that would be a BAD BAD BAD thing for the platform. you have to have Word and Excel!
vSpacken
Yeah, I agree. Once M$ will use DRM in their Office docs, compaitiblity between "office-like" apps and M$ Office could become an issue.
Having M$ develop Office for the Mac, is a good thing. People still see M$ as the only developer of the "standard" Office applications.
I agree 100%. Years ago, after Microsoft signed the agreement with Apple, many naïve people started to think that MS was finally doing someting "good", something that was more than just making money and gathering power wherever possible. But MS never did more than that, they are just too bad. Today it's very clear why they did it:
In many other branches one can see that they are starting to loose their market share: goverment, (open)office, the whole afraid-of-virusses-market, ... One of the main reason for this loss in market share is because companies that survived Microsoft have been developing stategies against them as a result of their agressive attempts of monopolisation. Apple is the golden example of such company, along with IBM, SUN, and some "new" linux companies like RedHat.
Yet, meanwhile MS engineers have become so lazy of never making anything right and always having to trust in the marketing that they may not survive the next counterattack of office developers (OOo v2 and maybe Apple's Office). And to make things worse for them they will have an office format that is compatible with nothing, unless their own latest latest office version. This is all acompanied with attacks from other branches, I'm thinking of the new browser wars, and the very recent virus wars.
I hope we will see a "Safari scenario" for their next office version so that more people start to drop Microsoft for something better (=~ anything else).
- DRM will be standard in office (like it is for ripping CDs in wma) and you WILL need their products to be compatible with their "de facto" standard.
- If somebody dares to make an office suite that is better than theirs, they'll drop their own, resulting in people dropping the operating system because it doesn't support the "standard" any more
In many other branches one can see that they are starting to loose their market share: goverment, (open)office, the whole afraid-of-virusses-market, ... One of the main reason for this loss in market share is because companies that survived Microsoft have been developing stategies against them as a result of their agressive attempts of monopolisation. Apple is the golden example of such company, along with IBM, SUN, and some "new" linux companies like RedHat.
Yet, meanwhile MS engineers have become so lazy of never making anything right and always having to trust in the marketing that they may not survive the next counterattack of office developers (OOo v2 and maybe Apple's Office). And to make things worse for them they will have an office format that is compatible with nothing, unless their own latest latest office version. This is all acompanied with attacks from other branches, I'm thinking of the new browser wars, and the very recent virus wars.
I hope we will see a "Safari scenario" for their next office version so that more people start to drop Microsoft for something better (=~ anything else).
There are a couple of reasons why i don't think DRM in office is goint to be that big a problem in the short term.
1. Only the latest version of office will be able to read and create the DRM-ed files. The new version of office is unlikely to be a large proportion of the installed base for a while still. given that and the fact that not all files produced will be DRM limited means that these files will probably be vary rare for a while still.
2. Also reverse engineering the file format to ensure compatibility does not fall foul of the law. Let me explain what i mean. Reverse engineering the DRM format to allow other applications to read them will not be illeagal provided the application impliments a similar DRM environment for the file. So as long as the application can't be used to circumvent the DRM, reverse engineering the format for compatibility is perfectly fine.
1. Only the latest version of office will be able to read and create the DRM-ed files. The new version of office is unlikely to be a large proportion of the installed base for a while still. given that and the fact that not all files produced will be DRM limited means that these files will probably be vary rare for a while still.
2. Also reverse engineering the file format to ensure compatibility does not fall foul of the law. Let me explain what i mean. Reverse engineering the DRM format to allow other applications to read them will not be illeagal provided the application impliments a similar DRM environment for the file. So as long as the application can't be used to circumvent the DRM, reverse engineering the format for compatibility is perfectly fine.
The keynote file format is unlikly to be used for anything other than keynote. The apxl extnesion stands for Apple Presentation XML. I would expect a word processor to use a simlar, but different xml based format. Note that kenote apxl files are actually directories containing a single xml file and all the images used in the presentation.
Openoffice uses XML format for save files...it would be nice if this could hint to the future possibility of Openoffice/Appleworks/Keynote to somehow become one do-all package. I know this will probably never happen, but talk about one potential match made in heaven for all of us stuck using an over-priced MS Office suite.