For Fans of Apple Computer, It Was a Keeper of a Week

It’s still hard to get used to the sea change in Apple’s relationship with Microsoft. The two companies could have changed the name of last week’s Macworld Expo trade show to Apple-Microsoft Lovefest ’98.

The show brought sorely needed good news for the Mac, including the surprising announcement by interim Chief Executive Steve Jobs that Apple turned a tidy $45-million profit in the last quarter--based in part on the overnight popularity of its new G3 models.

But the most important product news was not from Apple: Its new best friend, Microsoft, unveiled Mac Office 98. In case you’re one of the few users unacquainted with Microsoft’s cash cow productivity suite, Mac Office includes Word, the Excel spreadsheet program, the PowerPoint presentation package, and the Internet Explorer Web browser and Outlook Express e-mail client. (It lacks the database program Access, which is included in the Windows version of the suite.) Mac Office 98 will ship in March for $499, or $299 for upgrades.

During Jobs’ Macworld keynote, initial boos at the mention of Microsoft--typical from the show’s partisan hordes--were transformed into cheers at the demo of Office 98.

*

To understand why the tough crowd was tamed, consider the context: Without a strong office suite, the Mac is lost to general-purpose computing.

Last August, Microsoft promised to continue Mac Office development for five years and said it would create a dedicated Mac development team--abandoning its historic approach to Mac development as a feeble graft onto Windows applications. The old method created such monsters as Mac Word 6.0.

So what’s different about Office 98? First, it was based on the efforts of a dedicated, 200-person team--possibly the largest Macintosh team outside Apple. “We’re making more of an effort on Mac applications now than ever before in the history of Microsoft,” says Ben Waldman, the unit’s general manager.

And it shows. Office 98 offers the look and feel Mac users expect and the tight integration with the Mac OS, including the addition of QuickTime to the standard drawing tools. And it makes meaningful innovations that appear only in the Mac version--a relative rarity from any big developer these days: drag-and-drop installation (just drag the application from the CD to your hard drive), a WYSIWYG font menu and a real-time thesaurus.

Office 98 also has a “software, heal thyself” scheme--if you accidentally delete a necessary program file, Office restores it automatically--and drag-and-drop between Office applications. It uses the same file formats as Windows Office 97 and improves its group-editing features--essential for keeping the Mac in the mix within most big companies.

*

Mac Office 98 was made possible by an amazing new management technique: cooperation. Credit Steve Jobs with turning a tense marriage of necessity into something more useful to users.

Microsoft, of course, is no philanthropist. Apple now ships Internet Explorer as the default browser on all new Macs. And as Microsoft’s Waldman says, “if Apple went away tomorrow, we’d still have 8 1/2 million Mac customers out there.”

But even with one profitable quarter and Office 98, Apple still faces the little problems of plummeting market share and no inexpensive computers to sell, which partly accounts for its decline in November to less than 2% of the retail market, according to market researcher Computer Intelligence.

In an interview, Jon Rubinstein, Apple’s vice president for hardware engineering, was painfully careful not to announce future product plans, but said this about low-priced Macs: “Our entry-level offering today is 1,400 bucks, and that’s too high.” He added, about the market message in this, “We get it.”

Then there’s the matter of finding a new CEO who is willing to work in the shadow of Jobs, who is being pressured by Apple’s board to make his temporary status permanent.

Still, for the future of the Mac, last week was a keeper.

*

Charles Piller can be reached via e-mail at cpiller@aol.com