Breaking up is hard to do

Every long-term relationship that ends has that awkward period as it winds down.

A couple has been married -- for a couple years or even for decades -- but then they start to drift. The things they've always done start to get a little more annoying than they used to. "Has he always snored this loud?" "Has she always been this much of a nag?"

Slowly, these feelings might turn into "You don't pay enough attention to me." And then, the lover who feels spurned actually opens her eyes a bit and notices that other men actually find her attractive. Maybe she could do better? Maybe this is a dead end and I should get out? The other lover, the dominant one, starts posturing and beating his chest and saying that she's no good as a wife, anything but admitting that he may be at fault for not paying enough attention to her.

For Microsoft and Apple, the road between the high school prom and these heady days of technological revolution has been a long one, fraught with lots of bumps. But with the maturation of OS X, Apple is starting to realize that it may not have to be stuck in a dead-end relationship forever.

In hindsight, the "Switch" campaign Apple is using to try and get Windows users to come over to the Apple platform was the opening salvo. For many years, there was this strange dependence on Microsoft, this fear that if they left, all of the Apple faithful would, too, because they wouldn't be able to open those e-mail attachments they got from their PC friends. Or Macs would become obsolete in corporate environments because it would be impossible for them to play nice with the proprietary word processing, spreadsheet and visual presentation documents those machines of capitalism have come to depend on.

So, as C|Net's David Coursey pointed out recently, and this is one of the few times I've completely agreed with David, Apple has begun shifting it's focus a bit. It's begun gobbling up every kind of software it can get its hands on and then delivering its own solution for its own hardware. iTunes, for example, was based on the code that gave us SoundJam for OS 8-9. And now, with the beefing of OS X in version 10.2, and productivity changes like a system-wide integrated address book, iSync and iCal, as Coursey said, "Apple is preparing for life without Microsoft." And that's where these recent charges for .mac accounts come from, too, he pointed out. Yes, bandwidth costs money and iTools was probably losing cash for the company, but with stormy seas in the industry -- and the possibility looming of the loss of Microsoft -- Apple can't afford to be bleeding cash from any part of its collective. The company will need all of its resources in the coming years, because the painful divorce is on its way.

As if to affirm my thoughts, C|Net is reporting that Apple and Sun are now working together to port StarOffice, the only real competitor to MS in the office productivity world, to OS X. The article reports that there will be a Java-based version of OpenOffice for X by the end of the year and a commercial StarOffice release next year.

According to the article, "Sun has been looking for hardware allies in its long-running quest to popularize StarOffice, which competes against Microsoft Office. To date, no major PC makers have pledged to heavily promote StarOffice."

Apple, recently disillusioned with its overbearing and abusive lover, finally has a new, sexy and intelligent date. There might be life without Microsoft, after all.

A friend of mine told me that he thought Apple should break free by finally beefing up Apple Works from the consumer-level basic set of apps that it is now to a prime alternative to Office v.X. Without this development, I agreed with him. But now, Apple may not have to do that.

Companies, like people, are meant to have relationships. Some of them are good, and some of them are bad. If you realize you're in a bad one, get out and find a better lover, one that will appreciate you and compliment your strengths and weaknesses by filling in the gaps.

Like all new relationships, it's hard to tell whether it will work out like that. But Apple, just like the newly-freed lover in a bad relationship, has no choice but to try, and even if it doesn't work out, it's sure to be one hell of a ride.