I HATE MICROSOFT WORD...any help !?!?

[ghmerrill]

Chinese tubas...American computers...

SOMEONE has their priorities all screwed up.

And therein is my question regarding the cost of Macs - why are they still so d----ed expensive if they are now made in China? They would seriously open up their own market by pricing their products more reasonably. Are they not pricing them on the notion of 'Made in America'? Please clarify.

This has always been an interesting question about Apple products in general. Part of the reason, I think, is that Apple has never had anywhere near the share of the PC market that has been held by Intel-based processor PCs (and their clones) for decades now. Part of the reason for this is that at a fairly early point (and at other points along the way) Apple chose to target certain "niche" markets that it felt were more "compatible with" its designs, goals, and production capabilities. They have always held their sights firmly on the education market and, partly as a consequence, basically abandoned the business market to others. But this has not been a bad idea for them since the competition in the business PC market pretty quickly became a cutthroat, mass volume, low cost and profit margin kind of affair. In that market you differentiate yourself primarily (nowadays at least) on grounds of price, reliability, and service/support. Apple differentiates itself primarily on grounds of reliability, superior design, and superior useability. But if you're a VP in IT purchasing, which way do you think you're going to go?

So after that, I think it's elementary supply/demand/scale issues in economics.

Apple has always been very strong in the educational and some other markets (graphic design, for example). They're all over the universities (especially among the faculty), and despite their significantly higher cost. A lot of students buy them, partly because the faculty do, partly because Macs are much "cooler" than MS PCs, etc. And Apple has always had a very powerful cult following. So they're doing well with this approach.

You also have to remember that the total cost of a product like a personal computer includes much more than the hardware. It includes the operating system and the applications as well -- and its the OS and the better-designed and implemented apps that Apple is really selling. These are what you're paying the premium for. These are not being cranked out in China, and reduced costs for materials and assembly do not affect them. Same with the iPhone, etc.

It is a good question concerning how much Apple would open its market by lowering the cost of their systems. While more individuals MIGHT buy them, this would in no way affect where the really big bucks are: in the business market. MS, and the whole suite of MS tools, is so firmly entrenched there now that I don't think Apple would make even a small dent through price changes. And my completely unsupported guess would be that even if they lowered the price to increase individual and education sales, the result would be at best a wash in terms of revenues. But that's just speculation.

[ghmerrill]

I really don't understand why the Mac users thought they had an "issue" to champion via the topic of this thread...Just like everyone else, they're stuck with having to send out (MICROSOFT) WORD-readable documents just like everyone else.

Gee, I didn't think I saw much championing at all in this thread -- compared to what I'm accustomed to from the fanatic (though usually young) Mac cultists I know. But I guess that impression depends on the crowd you run with .

However, I really don't understand the argument that everyone needs to send out Word-readable documents. The ONLY reason(s) to have to exchange Word-readable documents are if (a) your business requires it (i.e., the company you work for requires that you produce documentation in Word format), or (b) you want the readers of the documents to be able to CHANGE the documents. Otherwise, PDF is now pretty much the document format standard -- and you'll note that the latest releases of Word finally support PDF output reasonably and straightforwardly (well, mostly; I've seen some glitches), so even MS has gotten the message on that. In general, creating PDF documents is a much better way to go since then no one can easily change them (or if they do, this in general is pretty obvious and also requires a certain amount of determination and skill). PDF readers are free, everyone has one (you have to in order to get very far on the web nowadays), and you can even get applications for "marking up" PDFs if you want to add corrections or comments and return those to the author. Even in the large companies that I worked for, and which adopted Word as the "standard" word processor and document creation tool, I ended up putting most of my documents out in PDF format, and there were no problems with this.

Now it is true that if you actually get into publishing it is the case that some journals or conferences require submissions in Word format. However, these are generally humanities journals/conferences since the scientists know full well that Word is not adequate for their needs. Most journals support submissions in either Word (or Word/PDF) format or LaTeX (or LaTeX/PDF) format. And those that don't (in my experience) will loosen the Word requirement if you ask them too -- since there's really no justification for it. Printers would prefer to avoid Word!!

A remaining hold-out to some degree is Kindle. I think that if you want to publish a Kindle book, you are probably best served by doing it in word and using Amazon's converter. But even there, if you know enough to manage your own HTML output and editing, I don't think it's necessary.

[The Jackson]

I've not taken the time to ask my friends who go to other schools, but the SafeAssignment upload system that UMiami uses accepts PDF, RTF, and even TXT files. We students get MS Office for free, but I have not seen any evidence of it being imposed as a de facto standard or something like that. All of the teachers I've had preferred most written assignments be turned in by hand, anyway. The online uploads seemed to be reserved for the last papers of each term.

[TubaTodd]

Putting my official "nerd stamp" on this topic...

After Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, OpenOffice became a second class citizen. Well, since the code was open source, the "community at large" said "we'll take that...thank you." Now we have...

http://www.libreoffice.org/

LibreOffice IS OpenOffice, with a new name. Recently Oracle gave the OpenOffice "stuff" they still had over to the Apache Foundation. I'm not sure what that means, but going forward you're going to want to download and use LibreOffice. It's the latest code base. Version 3.4 is the most current.

[k001k47]

Remember when Microsoft was good?

[Kevin Hendrick]

Remember when Microsoft was good?

Still is, if you cook it right ...