Microsoft bares Steve Jobs' Flash rant claptrap Steve Jobs' credibility took another hit on Tuesday when Microsoft let the world know that its upcoming Office for Mac 2011 won't be fully based on Apple's Cocoa frameworks. In a blog post, as The Reg reported earlier today, Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit (MacBU) noted that "we haven't completed the transition of moving …
"We'll leave it up to you, dear reader, to form your own opinion as to whether Jobs was naïvely mistaken or intentionally deceptive."
But MS Office is NOT a "major third-party app" for Mac OS X! Macs are primarily sold to the *consumer* sector, not to corporates—Apple couldn't give a damn about the latter market. (All those market share stats conveniently miss this fact.)
MS Office is not an essential purchase for the vast majority of Mac owners. OpenOffice and iWork will fulfil 90% of most users' needs. For the rest, there's CrossOver, Parallels or VMWare, which let you run the Windows version of MS Office and avoid the file compatibility headaches to which the Mac version is infamously prone. (And by Microsoft's own admission, at that.)
"But MS Office is NOT a "major third-party app" for Mac OS X!"
Apple's survival in the 1990s had nothing to do with Microsoft products, oh no! "We were never allies with Eurasia!" That's the great thing about the Apple "scene": everyone gets to pretend things were different, claim that the fruit conquers all, and to explain away any embarrassing dependency on non-Apple products. "I only have Microsoft Office on my Mac for the occasional work document!" Yeah, sure you do.
I'm a fanboi, but i find it hilarious how my fellow fanbois are defending Jobs here.
To "Sean Timarco Baggaley", most people don't need CS5, either, so saying most people don't use Office and therefore Jobs was right in saying Adobe is the last major vendor to go to Cocoa is nonsensical. More Mac people may use CS5 than Office, but I can guarantee you most Mac users don't know what Adobe even is as a company, let alone use any of their products.
Yeah, Jobs "screwed up" with that statement. But I'm not surprised Microsoft hasn't moved fully to Cocoa. To the best of my knowledge, Office 2010 is not fully ".NET" either (actually, is any of it .NET???), so it isn't like Microsoft is setting some kind of precedent here in terms of not using the latest frameworks.
Heck, iTunes on Mac isn't even a Cocoa app. And until Snow Leopard, Mail wasn't in Cocoa, either.
Basically, using Cocoa as an argument is a silly thing for Jobs to do. He should just stick to the fact that Flash on a Mac sucks (which it does), and that he has no faith that Adobe is going to fix it for mobile (which, from everything I've seen with the Android port, Adobe is struggling like mad to make it even remotely functional).
One of two things will happen... either Adobe will fix Flash for mobile, after iterations of crashing Android phones, at which point Apple will let it on the iPhone, or they won't fix it, and Android phones will dump it and web sites will go flash free. Either way, Apple "wins". Adobe's the one with the gun pointed at its head.
On a vaguely related note: why the hell does an office suite need so much memory it can't be 32bit anyway?
And, how difficult can it be to move to Cocoa? I'm not a mac developer so don't have any idea specifically but assuming the main logic is separate from the UI (as it should be) it can't be that hard surely? OK, maybe it's not quite the same scale but I've moved .NET stuff from WinForms to WPF easily enough - and AWT to Swing in Java.
"On a vaguely related note: why the hell does an office suite need so much memory it can't be 32bit anyway?"
Why that'll be so you can memory cache more data from your uber-shitty user created Access database. Not on Office for Mac though.
32 bit X86 is notoriously register starved and CPUs waste a lot of cycles moving things in and out of registers. When AMD designed their 64 bit processor they had the bright idea to actually increase the number of registers as well and that arguably offers more of a performance improvement for most tasks than the larger resister sizes.
So how is it that Microsoft's not having <b>completely</b> migrated to Cocoa in any way dispute the fact that Adobe was the last to move over? And, for that matter, why do you try to claim that Apple offers third-party apps?
Some people might think this is hair-splitting, but when you say somebody is lying, you have an extra burden of proof. Aren't libel laws in the UK rather nastier against against willfully malicious misstatements, even if they were fueled by incompetence?
"Aren't libel laws in the UK rather nastier against against willfully malicious misstatements, even if they were fueled by incompetence?"
The libel laws in the UK are nasty, but I don't think you earn a great deal of respect for waving them in people's faces when they raise a valid question. The last thing any properly functioning society needs is a bunch of corporations suing people for questioning the public statements of those corporations' representatives, unless your idea of a properly functioning society is one where all anyone may do is applaud the latest masterwork from the "delicate geniuses" as they do and say more or less what they like, unchecked by public scrutiny.
" Steve Jobs saying that the release of its Cocoa-centric Creative Suite 5 made Adobe the last major third-party developer to port its apps to Cocoa is simply wrong," except that he didn't say that. He said Adobe was the last major third-party developer to port its apps to OS X, not to Cocoa.
Although I suppose one could argue that Adobe beat Quark—if you still consider Quark to be a "major developer."
I posted the same thing last night, but it hasn't shown up!
To me the full stop between the Cocoa sentence and the Adobe one seperates the context. In fact you could replace it with an overemphasised AND, but it would still indicate they were the last to support OS X (i.e. not Cocoa specifically)
More Apple Bashing from the Reg, normally I'd support it - but there has to be a line. Lets call it realism (i.e. is it realistic to bash Apple because the author can't properly parse english?)
If you want to bash them for anything, bash 'em for being arrogant cocks (sadly applies to members of both sides)
"Steve Jobs' credibility took another hit"? Perhaps, but I'd say Microsoft's credibility took an even bigger one. More than a decade after Cocoa's introduction, they still haven't gotten their act together. But then, given that Microsoft has lost half its value in that decade, perhaps that's not surprising.
How long have MS been selling 64-bit versions of Windows?
And the reason they're not making Mac Office 2011 64-bit is because they need to keep it compatible with the Windows one, which is also 32-bit.
In the egg-on-face stakes, I think MS have won that round.
Although to be fair, there probably isn't that much of a demand. My office machine is five years old and running a ten year old OS, it's due to be "refreshed" this year,but the new machine will still be running a ten year old OS.
Progress? We've heard of it.
Rail all you want, Macophiles...in my office and on my web forums I hear all the muttered criticism of crapplication suites like iDon'tWork and Open Office, and when Jobsian cenobites think no one's listening, the gist of their rants is "it'd be great if this stuff was more like MS Office."
It's not a productivity suite if it isn't productive, and the functional foibles of those programs are glaring enough that all the militant Applists in the world can't hide the facts.
Err, you!
I'm not the first to say that your post was unintelligible.
I've got Office 2004 for OSX. It sucks. It makes Office for Windows seem like it isn't that bloated. It's not that good at preserving table layouts when you save - and it has various other problems too.
So all in all, I would never say "it'd be great if this stuff was more like MS Office" in fact, I'm more likely to say "Why is MS Office such a steaming pile of dog turd? Can't they fix it soon? They've only had 20 years to work on it"
... but his point was that third parties take their own sweet time to adapt to changes in Apple's software and hardware environment. The fact that MS is even more sluggish than Adobe just reinforces Steve's reasoning for keeping Silverlight and .net the hell away from iOS.
Not only have 3rd party developers in the mobile space have to "adapt to changes Apples software and hardware environment", but they have to track a multitude of frequent changes in the SDK T&C - any one of which could mean their entire product has to be thrown out and written from scratch.
And on the Desktop, the source tree for the likes of CS5 is likely bigger than the entire Mac OS one, kernel and Cocoa included.
The Microsoft Office Suite is likely to be a very large code base, of which Mac is not a primary target (so will get fewer development resources allocated to it). Porting existing applications from one platform / toolkit to another is a lot of work.
All this means is that Microsoft did not complete the transition to Cocoa for this release of Office. It says nothing about the credibility of Steve Jobs or the Cocoa framework.
That's like saying that colour comics are not a credible media because a comic could not be coloured in time for release and was released in black & white instead.
"That's like saying that colour comics are not a credible media because a comic could not be coloured in time for release and was released in black & white instead."
...and if every comic you released for 10 years was in black and white, people would perhaps start to look at the shiny colourful competitors, wouldn't they?
Heinlein said "You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity"
Robert J Hanlon - not in anyway related to Heinlein made the above quote, which may or may not be a corruption of Heinlein's version.
I personally prefer Ingham's version - "Cock-up before conspiracy".
here is an idea Register, why don't you go buy an Evo, and tell us how many flash sites you get to before it crashes, hangs, does not work. and how slow it is... actually just do a nice round number of 100 sites, and split them equally between restaurant/business, games... video content... other... or so...
then report back to us? was Steve really wrong about this or not?
>here is an idea Register, why don't you go buy an Evo, and tell us how many flash sites you get to before it crashes, hangs, does not work. and how slow it is...
I have a Nexus running Froyo and 10.1 Beta - I'm sorry to inform you that Flash works really well at full framerates.
Little point debating it anyway - its coming for every smartphone and platform except Apple's iDevices, so the vast majority of users have the choice to use it or not.
Maybe folk will continue to pay for and/or download their RIA and mini-games as Apps but I think its doubtful - and so did Apple.
Perhaps I'm just too trusting a human being, but I read honkj's comment as a serious suggestion for a test, not an anti-Android flame. Maybe that's just because I know my HTC Desire hasn't crashed once while displaying a website, with or without Flash. Then again, I haven't visited a vast number of Flash-heavy sites, so I'd love to see a test of the sort honkj advocates.
Wake up and smell 2010 mate. Out of 23 of our customers, over a third of them primarily use Macs. Another 3 have them as part of their IT strategy. In small business I suspect that number is getting greater. So Office IS actually quite important, as Microsoft need to maintain their stranglehold of document formats across the two platforms as the competition increases.
You're right about iWork though - it's fast and much nicer than Mac office, but it suffers from the same occasional formatting issues as OpenOffice, so regardless of the reasons why, there's still a place for the Microsoft offering.
The so-called "Flash" rant by Stevie was in regards to not allowing Flash on iPhone/iPad nor using cross-platform development tools for the iPhone/iPad.
Apple nor Stevie has NOT prohibited cross-platform development tools for Mac OS X nor banned applications not using proper frameworks. In fact, there is absolutely ZERO control of Apple over any software released for OS X.
SO what is the point of this article then and how it connects Microsoft Office 2011 and the "Flash" storm?
I'd interpret
"Adobe was the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X."
As saying that they were the last to release a Mac version of their product. Aside from the preceding sentence, there's no reference to Cocoa. I'd have said this sentence stands alone personally.
I'm usually quite quick to bash Apple, but I'd say this article is just Anti-Apple propoganda. If you want to criticise them, do some research and find something worthy of criticism (there's not exactly a shortfall), but deliberately misinterpreting words is below you (or used to be)
This is the kind of drivel I'd expect the DM to write.
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