BY DAN
KENNEDY
Serving the reality-based community since 2002.
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Friday, September 26, 2003
Another bite of the Apple.
Media Log is all blogged out after yesterday's two-hour Democratic
extravaganza. Be sure to see my Phoenix colleague Adam
Reilly's take on the proceedings. Click here.
LS sent a fascinating e-mail
responding to yesterday's
item on the slow-motion
breakdown of the Apple-Microsoft alliance. He writes:
Just read your media log
entry about Apple and wanted to comment on a couple things:
First, it's my view (as an IT
manager myself), that the IRM technology is going to be a very
slow starter, if it gets off the ground at all. Why? Because not
only will it break compatibility with Mac Office, but it will also
break compatibility with older versions of Office for Windows. At
several hundred dollars per desktop, many companies are going to
put-off upgrading to Office 2003 as long as possible.... IRM won't
be useful until a majority of users have a version of Office
capable of dealing with IRM-encoded files. The free viewer MS is
offering will only be useful for viewing those files, not creating
them, thus creating a one-way communication. Might as well send a
fax…
Also, MS is working on another
version of Office for Mac OS X. I think that if they are serious
about IRM taking-off, MS will have to add it to the Mac version as
well. I doubt that MS expects people to dump their Macs just so
they can use IRM.
Second, at the same time MS
announced they weren't going to develop IE for Mac anymore, they
also announced that they were ceasing production on a standalone
IE for Windows. Basically they are embedding IE even deeper into
the Windows OS. Apple has similar plans for Safari, embedding the
core technologies into OS X so that any application can be
programmed to take advantage of the Safari rendering engine. The
one difference between MS and Apple, is that Apple is building all
their core tech around open standards, vs. Microsoft which keeps
inventing their own closed systems.
Apple is as strong as it's been
in a long time, with an amazing line-up of products and a killer
OS. As we start to exit the recession, I think Apple is poised to
grow significantly.
I hope LS is right.
posted at 12:38 PM |
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Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
