From: kholland@hydra.unm.edu (Kiernan Holland)
Subject: Re: CBM, This is not STUPID this is a PROPOSITION
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 92 07:36:38 GMT
Organization: University of New Mexico, Albuquerque

In article <1992Aug13.001612.16988@microsoft.com> iank@microsoft.com (Ian Kennedy) writes:
>In article <1992Aug11.141929.22041@newshost.unh.edu> ggg@kepler.unh.edu (Gregory G Greene) writes:
>>	How much would Microsoft charge for such a license?  Could any Amiga
>>   software company afford it?  I can't amagine that Microsoft is going to
>>   give it away.
>
>A while ago (greater than a year) there was a rumor in the mill
>here at MS that we had contracted out to a bunch of Euro
>developers to do Works for the Amiga. I confirmed this with
>an E-Mail to BillG. Then we heard that the deal had fallen through,
>no details. The European folks had wanted USD 200,000 for the port,
>according to the rumor mill.
>
>I heartily believe that if a reputable Amiga development team like
>Gold Disk or GVP contacted Microsoft they could work out an equitable
>agreement to port the MS application of their choice as long as there
>was little or no risk to Microsoft. A port of one of our larger
>applications like Word or Excel would be a monumental task. There
>are many feature these applications use that are part of Windows, but
>not available on the Amiga. I'm sure good Amiga developers could beat these
>problems with a little effort though. For instance, instead of using
>Embeded Basic in MS Word, the Amiga version of word would have an integrated
>ARexx interpreter/editer and a slew of ARexx functions. The ability
>to import/export WordBasic would be included. OLE/DDE could be
>replaced with an extended HotLinks. IT COULD BE DONE! This kind of
>effort would take a lot of cash and personel. Only the larger Amiga
>development houses could hope to pull it off. Things the MS developers
>had done for them would have to be coded for the Amiga, like a help
>engine. Wouldn't it be cool to have a common help engine on the Amiga?
>Press the help key ANYWHERE and get a response(even a "cannot find helpfile"
>would e better than nothing!).
>
>Ah... to dream. To ship every new AA-Amiga with MS-Word on the
>hard disk...
>
>Ian.
>-- 
>/* IanK@Microsoft.com		*/
>/* I want my 32bit chip set	*/
>

MSword is a nice program, but I would hardly ask any big software house to waste
their time in porting another MickeySoft program to the Amiga. 
I can survive without word. If I need it, I'll get AMAX II and get the 
MAC version, since it probably better done than the Windows version. 

To me, graphics are second to ease of use. Windows is a National Geographic
for Pee Wee Herman.                         

Have you seen Final Copy?? I'm looking into it. 
I think it would be cheaper to emulate MSWORD with all those 
fancy capabilities using just a mid-bare-bones word processor with 
full-Arexx compatibilty and several Arexx programs that professional users
could modify to meet their needs. The more I look at Amigados, 
the more I understand why soooo many FTP nets have started 
supporting Amiga software. It is just like using UNIX. 
In fact Amigados is more fun than UNIX. At least you aren't wasting half 
your time on the manuals. There is more time for experimenting too.