Gates on Apple and Office for OS X
Posted on January 10, 2005
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Gizmodo is running an on-going interview with Bill Gates and in today’s installment they touch upon his feelings about Office for X and Apple’s once-again expected foray into the word processing space:
Gizmodo: How do you feel about this rumor going around that Apple’s going to launch their own Office competitor? Their own office suite.
Gates: They’ve always had a Works-type product.
Gizmodo: Yeah, but if they end up coming out with an actual competitor and sort of billing it as that, would that… Since Office for the Mac has always been—well, not a huge revenue generator, but it’s always been that one…
Gates: It’s been a great business for us. I mean, not as a percentage of Microsoft, but it’s a very, very good business. We have a great relationship with Apple.
I don’t know what they’re thinking, but they’ve always had the low-end product—It’s actually not that low-end. It’s pretty good. Not as good as Office, but not bad at all—that they’ve bundled in with different machines.
Gizmodo: And that’s why it seems sort of weird to me, because Office for the Mac is sort of one of the must-have OSX programs.
Gates: Because we’ve done a good job on it. There are freeware Office-type offerings that run on MacOS. I don’t keep up to date on which ones and all that, but it’s not like Mac users don’t have various alternatives. We’ve kept the price of Office low enough—Student and Teacher editions, educational pricing—and we’re very aggressive. Those are the markets where over 90% of the Macs sell into. I think it’s a very good value. So, we hope we keep doing well! It allows us to invest in it. Our Mac Office group has been very, very innovative.
Good stuff. He’s right, the Mac Office team has been innovative. If you’ve had cause to switch between Word on Windows and Word on OS X the difference is palpable: Word for OS X is slicker and less irritating. And it has less stuff in that good way - it has less on the screen without sacrificing functionality (at least thats how it seems to me but then I do most of my writing in BBEdit).
And, as one would expect, he deftly side-steps the issue of what would become of Office for X should Apple ship an office-esque suite that could actually compete with MS Office. It will be interesting to see how this plays out; historically Apple does not have a good track record in maintaining its forays into the word processing space. My guess: nothing Apple does will impact the sales of Office for X at all, even if they do bundle their offering for free.