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Originally posted by homer
Are you referring to Palm Syncronization in Enterouge?
Yes, that was the original point of the thread which I replied to.
That feature was added because people wanted it.
Where was the profit motive then?
The Mac group at MS knows that few if any Mac users use PocketPCs, therefore, for Mac handheld synchronization, it only made sense to support the Palm.
Why does it make sense? Were there a significant number of people refusing to buy Office for Mac because it didn't have Entourage syncing with Palm?
I don't know the stats, but I personally know 40+ people using Macs and Palms and 0 using Macs and PocketPCs.
Unfortunately, that's the flaw with anecdotal evidence, it doesn't prove much at an individual level.
Not sure what that has to do with the point you were makin, but most Macs in office settings have a copy of Office on them.
The point I was making is that there isn't really much of a business case for writing a free add-on for syncing Entourage with a Palm. This suggests that either a) it's not a pure business decision, or b) the reason it's a pure business decision has nothing to do with the profitability of the Mac division.
Yes. There was. Maybe not Entourage specifically, but there was pent-up demand for a Mac-only, updated version of Office.
But those are hardly the same thing.
And that's what Office X is. MS has decided not to port Outlook Express at this point to OSX and so decided to go with Enterouge...a rewritten app just for the Mac.
I was under the impression that Entourage was more analogous to Outlook proper.
It is also a first-step towards getting a Mac-friendly Outlook client. Something Mac users have been begging MS for years about.
If they're such a profitable division, why haven't they listened yet? And yet why _have_ they come out with a conduit for a product which _by_definition_ will only hit a subset of a subset of a subset of the Mac community (Mac users with OS X _and_ Office X _and_ Palms), which has supposedly slipped to only 3.5% of the desktop market _as_a_whole_?
In comparison to their windows group, is the Mac a highly succesful department? Not in purse $$$s, but it certainly is nothing to scoff at.
Perhaps not from a profitability standpoint, but then again, I haven't seen any concrete numbers, so I've nothing to go on except your claim.
The biggest selling software for the Mac platform is Microsoft products.
Do they have any competitors?
If you were the leading software provider for a market and you made money doing that, what other reasons would you need?
Quite the contrary, if you were the leading software provider for a market, and made money doing that with little to no effort, why expend any more effort than that?
The Mac group is autonomous within Microsoft in that they don't have to abide by what the Windows group is doing.
No, but they certainly have to abide by what Microsoft tells them to do.
They can update and release their software at their own pace.
Do you honestly believe that? Even _if_ true, then it suggests that honest pure business decisions are peripheral to their existence.
They don't share code, and they listen to users.
The same could be said of the Windows Office group. AAMOF, they listen to users _too_ well. Many of the problems with Office's code bloat are due to features requested by an insignificant portion of users being added to the whole.
The Mac group actually is a very smart, talented group of programmers.
I'm sure that Microsoft has quite a lot of those in various departments.
They don't make software because the legal department requested it.
I couldn't care less about the legal department. Ultimately they answer to someone outside of their division in the Microsoft management structure. If you tell me they don't care about _those_ requests, you're fooling yourself.
They make software because their users requested it.
I thought they did it to make a profit?
Granted, neither I nor you can say why, exactly, they do what they do.
Perhaps not, but if it's a pure business decision, I can certainly take an educated guess, hence my questions.
I'm not a microsoft fan. There's a lot that can be improved on the backend in all of the Macintosh products Microsoft makes. That said, MS's mac group has consistently come out with usable and innovative user interfaces and features as of late.
And I'm not necessarily a Microsoft detractor. What I _am_ though, is justifiably suspicious of the motivations of a company whose management has shown a history of these sorts of moves (and had them documented in court).
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