Microsoft bails Out on Apple

Well, not entirely. But they've announced officially that they're abandoning any further development of Explorer for the Mac. Now, since I haven't really used Explorer for the last two years (being far more partial to Safari and now, that's it's improving, Firefox (on which I write this blog, mostly because a some of the functionality doesn't work in Safari (like linking)) I really don't care much. But I think it's interesting. It also gives me one more reason to sell those useless shares of Microsoft that I bought a few years ago (right in time for an extended period of ZERO growth.)

The next big part of the space race between MS and Google is apparently on a whole different front and from what I hear Google is in the lead on this (as with everything else.) Check this out. Apparently the internet now functions at sufficient speed to use MS Word online. Meaning, that instead of booting up your Mac or PC and opening up the copy of MS Word that you bought (which by the way, you do not technically own) you will now log into MS Word which will be stored on a mainframe up in the pacific northwest. Eventually the goal is to have your computer's entire operating system on someone else's computers.

Why does this matter in a film blog? Well, mostly because Apple has been one of the major players in changing the future of film. Final Cut was a revolutionary piece of software that put film production into the hands of children (and I use that word in the sense that on set we, the crew, would sometimes refer to above the line people as the grown-ups) the way nothing else has before. Sure there are PC based non-linear editors but FCP lead the way.

By the way - I don't know if anyone has noticed, but the spell check in blogger pings the words, "blog" which is a bit like questioning your own existence, and "Google" which is I guess it's nod toward atheism as Blogger was created and is run by Google.

Forgive me. I just took a look here - and discovered that Google didn't create Blogger, but did buy it from the guys who did and now runs it. Pardon.

UPDATE on this one. I've been doing a little reading and apparently this has more to do with Mac's migration to Intel. I guess the process of Intelizing the Mac OS is kind of complicated and since no one is really using IE on Mac anyway, MS decided to blow it off. On the other hand, I'd prefer a good conspiracy story.