Aaron Toponce wrote:
On Wed, May 11, 2011 at 10:17:17PM -0400, Brad Alexander wrote:Their Mac support used to include MS office, back in the mid 90s. I know IT people from that era that said the Mac version of Office was so buggy, thanks to their putting the Intel debugging symbols into the Mac version, that entire IT departments switched from Mac to PC running Windows.Microsoft continues to ship Mac versions of Microsoft Office, and from my limited experience, I find it behaves better on Mac than on Windows, and there are features in the Mac version that don't exist in the Windows version. So, I don't know what you're driving at. Microsoft is continuing to support Office on Mac OS X, a platform they certainly don't need to support, with barely 12% of the desktop market share.
FYI: My experience is a lot more than limited - MS Office works just fine on Macs, it has for years. The major think lacking is support for macros, which is just as well from a security standpoint, and I understand that the latest release does support them (haven't upgraded yet).
Re. Skype: A major reason for supporting Linux (and Mac) users is that any communications program is only useful if you can reach the people you want to talk to. Chopping off significant numbers of users is not only an inconvenience to them, but to anyone who wants to reach them. That's part of the reason that we all pay a tax on our phone bills to subsidize rural telephone users - there's a benefit to having them on the network. For that matter, I expect at least some of the folks here are old enough to remember the days when we had dozens of different email services, which didn't talk to each other - once CompuServe started supporting SMTP email (commercial customers wanted to talk to their colleagues on the ARPANET), everyone else followed suit very quickly.
Miles Fidelman -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In<fnord> practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra