Replies to post #75568 on Apple Inc (AAPL)

[BlueDjinn]

If it wasn't for Entourage, I would've abandoned Office years ago. Unfortunately, I absolutely *hate* the way OS X Mail/Address Book/iCal integrate (that is, the info integrates well, but I hate the separate-app interfaces).

I played around with someting called CRM4Mac, but it isn't even close. I've returned to Entourage, and that's where I'm staying for the forseeable future.

[Tex]

re Office in Apple's sights

If it's true that 1/6 or so of all retail software revenue was captured by MS-Office, there's no question why Apple would want to offer a substitute. Apple's offerings need to become better substitutes (performance on Pages is so dog-slow on my G5 iMac that it's shocking, much worse than OpenOffice's relative NeoOffice, which in turn is a pig in comparison to MS-Office, which is a shocker given the criticism leveled against MS-Office as a resource hog). However, with Apple gaining momentum in hardware sales and increasing the market for its applications, I think Apple will have ample incentive to make its products increasingly attractive substitutes.

The money MSFT gets for MS-Office is really a shocker. I think Apple wants to make sure it makes more money on Apple customers than MSFT does :-)

Anyone have a model that might describe how Apple's growing marketshare might be expected to plateau? I'm not sure I have a principled basis for figuring out when to sell any of the shares I've got. Depending how you count my holdings, one might easily argue Apple is over two thirds my investable assets. So, in theory I want to pare back but in practice I'm not sure when I see exiting the equity as urged by the data.

Take care,
--Tex.