Apple has historically not directly marketed itself as an alternative to business, but has chosen to let business find it. Vista has certainly helped and the PC vs Mac tv ads could be argued as business ads.  Either way, with all the recent activity about “Exchange” this and “Exchange” that, it seems clear Apple is primed for a ninja like attack.  First release MobileMe, then a suite of online applications like iWork, then hit them with a lean, clean, fast and secure Snow Leopard.  

Look at some of the client’s that Apple touts on stage at the 2008 WWDC.  The Army! Really? The US ARMY?

What are the troops going to do with a iPhone in the field?  Is there signal in the Sahari?

If I worked in Redmond, I would be updating my resume before next years MacWorld.

Before the switch to Mac, in Windows, they would load up Firefox or IE, select a section of the web page with the mouse, copy it, paste it into Microsoft Word, delete a few rows from the table, change some text and print it.  All of this was to eliminate some unneeded data on the page which caused the print to span more than one sheet when printed.

Now on the Mac, same thing… select, copy, paste into Pages ‘08 or Microsoft Word and POW! Junk! A mangle of unformatted, misaligned, table stripped data.  What a mess!  A quick web search reports that because Apple had so much trouble getting Pages to act as an HTML editor in the ‘06 version, that they removed the capability entirely from the latest ‘08 edition.  Then why doesn’t MS Word work the way the Windows version does?  Don’t know.  Just doesn’t.  

So now the only option is to paste the page into Dreamweaver, a real HTML editor, and do it the right way.  That’s fine and all, but the average office worker doesn’t have and doesn’t need a professionals HTML editor just to do something they have been doing for years in Windows.  

The only option that “kinda” worked was to paste it into TextEdit in rich text mode. However, when printed it is very small and doesn’t fill the page and it still can not be moved from there into a Pages or Word document for presentation.

They can’t be the only one who has ever used web content in a printed document.  Sure, copying text is fine, but if that text is in a table…good luck.

I really hate hearing, “the Mac can’t do this…”.

Got any ideas? I’m all ears.

Apple has already started laying the groundwork by developing the integration components of mail, contacts, calendar, photos and iDisk.  An iWork/Web Pages document could start on the web, be continued on the iPhone and finished on Mac since it would be sitting on the users iDisk as a Pages document.  Speculation already abounds about iWork for the iPhone. Why not have complete web to desktop and back integration.  Look at www.280slides.com for evidence that it can be done. 

Reports are starting to surface about Apple’s move toward rich internet applications.  For the non-buzzword compliant folks this means web applications that look and work like desktop applications.  

With Microsoft rushing toward an online application presence with Live Mesh, I wonder if they notice Apple just strolling along patiently toward the same goal.  Apple doesn’t seem to care about the business market or the impending move of everything to the web, but at the same time they are moving into Google’s and Microsoft’s domain without being noticed.

Keep your eyes open to this one.  Next years MacWorld will be exciting.