My continued beef with OpenOffice and office web apps
Everyone seems to be tickled with all of the various open source and proprietary alternatives to Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint. Especially Mac users, since we have been offered the same old version of MS Office for years and years. It doesn’t even run native on the Mac yet.
I wish Mac-heads would stop putting so much energy on Word, Excel and Powerpoint alternatives. That’s not the problem and hasn’t been for years. The two apps that are important for us Mac users is a browser and email app. Thankfully Firefox has come to our rescue. Remember how bad browsing was on a Mac before Firefox.
But we haven’t solved the email nightmare. We need an alternative to MS Entourage! We need a new open source or proprietary mail client that works with Microsoft Exchange. The reality is that business world ain’t moving off of Exchange any time soon (I’m counting on Google and/or Yahoo’s Zimbra though).
Apple’s own Mail.app doesn’t work with Exchange. In fact there isn’t any mail client that runs on the Mac that works with MS Exchange except for…..Microsoft Entourage (2004 edition). It’s so bad that folks like Fred now has a Windows machine in his office.
I suspect he’s not alone.
