Reports are out today that state that the horrible regime known as Microsoft is not as Mac friendly as everyone had hoped. Since the supposed rebirth of Office for the Mac, Mac users everywhere have had nothing but kind words for Microsoft and their new commitment to Macs everywhere. The Office for the Mac has won multiple awards and acclaim from everywhere in the computing world. Now reports are stating that fun time is over. Soon office users everywhere will have to register their Office products just like windows users or they will stop working. Not funny.
What does this mean? Well from a business point of view, it is great. This means that there will be no more pirated (well not as much) Microsoft software out there. Profits will increase and Microsoft will grow large with money. For the consumer it means more money for software. There will be no more pirating software from the net unless you get the corporate version (which for the Mac is nearly non-existent). For us here in the office it means nothing but bad times as we will not be able to afford this new software (lets face it, we cant even afford to host our web site on a real server).
We here at the office think there was an alternative motive to Microsoft producing an award winning software package for the Mac. We like to compare it to a crack dealer- crack-head relationship. Lets assume Microsoft is the crack dealer, Office for the Mac is crack and Mac users are the crack-heads¹. The first thing that the crack dealer did was improve his product so that it was the best one on the market. He won all the crack dealer of the year awards, got all the crack-heads in the area to switch to his crack, and encouraged the use of pirated versions of his crack by not enforcing security. Once he had everyone using and addicted to his crack he jacked up the prices and made everyone pay and register on the web to use his crack. What are we supposed to do? We have no alternative to switch to. It is the industry standard. I feel so alone and cold.
But wait!
How many of you were screaming at the monitor and punching the mail to link at the bottom of the page? The one word on your lips was APPLEWORKS!!!. That is right, there is an alternative and it is all Apple. This change in security is actually a good thing for Mac users everywhere. This will no doubt increase exponentially the use of Apple's word-processing suite. Apple already has a great word-processing suite that has all the packages of Microsoft office and OSX has a great mail program. So, what is the big deal? The problem is that more people use office and are not as willing to switch, as are you and us. The waters could get stormy in the next few months.

Digital Hubbing
This is a promising rumor topic for many years to come. There are rumors of airport enabled DVD playing portable super video editing consoles (PSX2 enabled to boot). Apple is planning on some sort of portable QuickTime editor but is waiting until the prices of LCD screens comes down and demand for such a device increases. Lets face it, the ipod was a safe venture in an already established market. Portable video editors are not a huge market right now. These devices would probably be very costly to produce and thus have a high sales price (make ipods look relatively cheap). That is not to say that Apple is not in the process of producing such a device. We at AG think it is far off in the future. AS for other digital hub devices, we would expect another one in the early winter. A portable streaming video player is one idea that some people suggested. This device would contain an airport card that would be able to stream both mp3s and QuickTime video to other rooms in your house or office. This would be great for conference calls or presentations. It would also make it possible to play your favorite movies on your TV while streaming them from your computer. There is talk that this device would have DVD capabilities but that is packing too much punch in to one machine and Apple would not venture that much effort into one machine in our opinion. As for the rumored iwalk, you decide.

What do you think?
AG