Techotic

Software giants Microsoft and Apple have for several years, quietly tolerated one another. Apple’s OS X is the second largest operating system, but big brother Microsoft easily dominates the market.

The two well-known company chiefs, often make jokes about each other in public speeches. But in truth it is likely that they both need one another to further their individual aims.

Apple, via iTunes has domination of the music player world. While it seems nearly every company in the world uses Microsoft software products such as Word and Excel.

Microsoft office for Mac users has not been upgraded for nearly 5 years that was back in prehistory in computer terms that software was designed for the old eMacs, so an update was obviously needed.

The Microsoft office software is the essential tool for most office slaves. The new software for Mac has seen Microsoft make additions, with some very useful functionality. Stability has made a vast improvement, particularly for Intel-based Macs. That is if you can call the system not crashing five times a day, a function.

There are some genuine functions available for the new Office. Word will now make it much easier to track bibliographies, which will be useful tool for scholars and students. Newsletter designs will incorporate much more functions to improve design.

Excel has not changed very much from the older version, there are some new template designs, but it seems that Excel was well designed in the first place. And there is little room for improvement.

PowerPoint for Mac is now standard when it comes to presentations, which is strange as Apple’s Keynote is a superior product in every way.

The computer world has changed since the last release in 2004, one of the most significant is the Mac going with Intel. The office market has also changed considerably, with several cheap or even free options available to users.

StarOffice and NeoOffice have total office suites. You can also work on all your documents with On-line applications such as Zoho Suite, Google Documents and ThinkFree.

The mighty Microsoft is also facing pretty stiff competition from Apple’s iWork, which has a retail price down at £55, that is only 17% of the cost of a full Microsoft Office.

This begs the question why is Microsoft charging six times as much to produce a very similar product to Apple’s. Of course, when you complete your work, you generally have to pass it on to someone else. So even if you switch to cheaper software, the client you are sending the information too is probably using Microsoft. So to be compatible with the rest of the world it seems Microsoft is the only option.