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The Tech Night Owl Live — May 15, 2008

For more episodes, click here to visit the show’s home page.

When I first started writing computer books in 1994, I remember being asked whether I had a copy of Word installed on my Mac? You see, as with most publishers then and now, they rely heavily on Word’s Track Changes feature to monitor the editorial production process from the original manuscript to the final version that is used to generate the printed pages.

Now Word actually originated on the Mac, but it had its share of ups and downs over the years, and some of you might suggest the latter is the most common result. Word’s near-downfall occurred with the infamous version 6, which was a bad PC port, using their notorious “P code” to employ the same code base for both Mac and Windows.

Aside from the fact that it was slow to launch, the interface was dark, dreary, and lacked the proper Mac-like fit and finish that we demand for our favored platform. Yes, there were subsequent updates that addressed performance shortcomings, but you could almost get the feeling that Office for the Mac was dead, as far as Microsoft was concerned.

Of course, we have the Mac Business Unit now, and the ongoing pledge that Office:Mac development will continue for the indefinite future. In fact, Microsoft has already confirmed that a new version is under development, and that it will arrive two or three years from now. That schedule might depend on the successor for Office 2007 for Windows, since the Mac version has to be mostly compatible.

Yes, it also appears that Microsoft is moving lots of copies of Office 2008, and this week’s SP1 update appears to have mostly addressed the worst bugs and performance issues. However, we all know it has one show-stopping limitation, which is the lack of support for Microsoft’s Visual Basic for Applications feature, which is key to creating cross-platform macros.

In fact, certain Excel document are so customized with VBA they almost seem to be presenting themselves as a different application environment. While it’s not something I’ve used much, I once worked for a publisher that employed Word macros to maximum benefit to heavily format manuscripts so they’d be easy to translate to their chosen desktop publishing environment for final production.

With Office 2008, none of that is possible. The documents will indeed open, of course, but the functions provided by the macros will not be available. Working with MacTech magazine, Microsoft did provide some guidance on using AppleScript for Office 2008, but with no direct VBA to AppleScript translation mechanism, that was a poor solution.

True, VBA will be back in the next Mac version of Office, but where does that leave you now?

Today, if you must use macros on your Mac, you have to stick with Office 2004, or set up Windows with Boot Camp or a virtualization application and install Office for Windows instead. In fact, the latter solution is so effective, you probably won’t suffer any significant performance limitation, so long as your Intel-based Mac has plenty of RAM installed.

However that doesn’t help sell copies of Office 2008, right? Does that mean that the sales hike is only temporary, and that a large number of potential customers will simply sit out this version? If so, that could result in a self-fulfilling prophecy, assuming Microsoft actually would love to kill Office for the Mac eventually.

But I don’t believe that they want to dump Mac support. Aside from potential antitrust threats, Microsoft makes a nice amount of change from their Mac Business Unit, more than enough to keep a staff of over 200 (the largest ever) happily developing Office and a handful of other apps.

Microsoft’s excuse in losing VBA for Office 2008 was time. Moving everything to Apple’s Xcode environment so they could build a Universal application suite, took well over a year, they say. Bringing VBA along for the ride would have involved another delay of at least that much or even two years. Not good for the Mac division’s bottom line.

However, the biggest problem Microsoft may be facing now is that, without macro support, maybe Mac users really don’t need Office, even if they exchange documents with the Windows version. That can be accomplished with decent fidelity using Apple’s iWork ‘08. Even Track Changes comments are supported in both directions, so it may well be that your editor or publisher will never know you didn’t use Word.

Add that to the arrival of a new beta of OpenOffice for the Mac, ongoing development of Mariner Write, Nisus Writer Pro and Mellel, and the reasons for Office’s existence have been severely reduced over time. In fact, despite the false and persistent claim that the Mac platform doesn’t have a lot of software, when it comes to word processes, you have a rich selection.

If you want to ditch all things Microsoft from your Mac, you can probably do quite well, thank you. That’s something Microsoft should fear, because the loss of VBA and the loss of potential sales may only be the beginning.

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When the iTunes Music Store (that’s before they added movies and TV shows) first appeared, the pricing structure was absolutely rigid. Steve Jobs, they said, was obsessive about simplicity, witness the fairly limited Mac lineup since he took over Apple. So it would be now and forever 99 cents per song. When TV shows were added, it was $1.99 per episode.

Sure, there was some flexibility in album pricing, but you get the picture.

However, the entertainment industry, probably caught offguard by the tremendous success of iTunes, wanted more control on their product would be priced. When it came to singles, hits should be more expensive, and older catalog, songs that were no longer in demand, would be cheaper. Certainly one of the key reasons for Apple’s squabble with NBC/Universal was, at least in part, over multi-tier pricing.

However, even Steve Jobs, despite his great charisma and famously sharp negotiating skills, couldn’t hold sway over the entertainment bigwigs forever, and something had to give. The first crack in the dam was the iTunes movie rental program, where you had 30 days to begin viewing a flick, and 24 hours to finish, with a single exception. If you began watching the movie and the self-destruct clock struck, you’d OK a prompt to continue watching to the very end. But you wouldn’t be able to pause the movie without having to rent it all over again.

In general, essentially the same rental policy is prevalent throughout the industry, so Apple really isn’t inconveniencing you any more than any other movie download service. Indeed, I suppose you can call that flexibility, after a fashion. I call it stupid, but that’s just me.

For a brief period of time, DRM-free music was $1.29 per track, but that price was reduced, so everything is the very same 99 cents regardless. When it comes to buying a movie, you pay one price for new releases, usually $14.99 (I don’t know of any exceptions, but I’m being cautious here) and $9.99 for older product.

Then came HBO and its compelling catalog of original programming, which includes “The Sopranos” and “Sex and the City.” Again, we have a variable price policy when you buy a single episode. The former is $2.99, and the latter is $1.99. I won’t comment on the relative worth of these two shows, except to suggest that the former is probably more of a cult show, and hence more in demand. But with a movie version of the latter coming to a theater near you this month, I’d think the latter perhaps deserves a similar pricing policy, but then what do I know?

Now that some NBC shows are showing up on iTunes UK in two price categories, you can bet that Apple has begun to face the music and will be following suit in the U.S. very shortly. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to read a press release about the return of “Heroes” and other popular shows in the very near future.

Of course, it is also true that iTunes recently became the number one music retailer in this country. Their movie and TV catalog is sadly deficient, though, and if Apple has to make a few concessions with entertainment industry executives along the way so that you and I spend a little more money for the titles we want, so be it. Besides, I don’t think most people will mind having to pay different prices for different content. When was the last time you saw flat-rate DVD pricing at your local electronics store? See what I mean?

However, unlike Microsoft, you aren’t seeing more stringent DRM on iTunes, nor do I expect that to happen in our lifetime. In fact, aI fully expect that there will be more DRM-free music available in the very new future; it’s way overdue. That will not, however, happen with movies and TV shows, despite widespread piracy. The industry executives are far too paranoid and do not understand that the public will embrace legitimate media downloads if the restrictions do not seriously inhibit their ability to enjoy their favorites.

I can well believe that Steve Jobs was telling the truth when he said last year that Apple only instituted its FairPlay DRM system as a concession to get the music industry to release their catalogs to iTunes. An industry that is busy suing its customers for alleged copyright infringement isn’t going to relish giving away stuff without restrictions.

In a sense, the entertainment industry created its own monster, and needed Steve Jobs to rescue them from their folly. They have never been able to understand that most people are basically honest, and they do not spend the largest portion of their leisure time trolling for pirated product on peer-to-peer download sites. Sure, a lot of people will, just as you can visit many Third World countries on this planet and find a rich selection of pirated DVDs months before the official versions are released. That situation isn’t going to change, although I can see where taking action against large criminal organizations would help somewhat.

In the end, the industry has to you want to buy their stuff, and that means doing so in a friendly, relaxed atmosphere that gives you a fairly decent amount of freedom to copy to a variety of media and make backups in case the original goes bad.

But right now, they’re probably figuring how to soak you once again when digital versions of The Beatles catalog is released. I mean how many times do they expect you to buy the same stuff, even if the product is terrific? The more the merrier, it seems. They need to finance their fancy cars, yachts and the other accoutrements of an extravagant life style, right?

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