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Comment by nytesky | Hacker News Reader

Did Apple pay them to drop support to boost their revamped Numbers/Pages/Keynote suite (ClarisWorks Infitniy.0).

Obviously this is a joke, though there was a period when Microsoft invested in Apple to serve as a stand-in foil for the anti-trust lawsuit. So tactical investing for something other than monetary ROI has precedent …

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In a way it's not a joke. I was just considering that myself. I pay for a M365 family license, but when I think about it, I could do everything I actually use it for in Numbers and Pages. The only thing is file format compatibility, it is useful to be able to open word documents and be sure the formatting is correct, but even that is less important than it used to be. I used to make use of Office to edit work documents on my Mac, but security considerations prevent this now.

Switch to iWork and get a copy of LibreOffice whenever an old docx document looks funky in Pages.

Buy yourself something nice every month with the money you save.

The only reason I pay for M365 family is for the 1 TB per member storage. Excel is a bonus, and Word and Powerpoint are basically not needed any more.

If a better storage deal comes along, I'll happily cancel.

I agree the 1TB is a good deal. But our phones are Apple and our email is Google, so it’s all wonky sync via OneDrive (and when you have a lot of OneDrive the forced syncs to your windows login takes a lot of cache space).

Wish there was an open interface to use cloud storage, like a mount point, so Gmail or iPhotos could just write there rather than the hand carrying of data. But probably vendor lock-in is too compelling

This actually isn't that far-fetched, once Microsoft saw that the bundled competing suite went subscription, they were free to drop their "perpetual" support.

I would occasionally see the standalone MS for Mac on sale for ~$30 and considered getting a copy just in case I needed it for some compatibility reason, but I just knew there was a catch. So I just kept running Libre. Glad I didn't waste the money.

People keep saying that Microsoft invested in Apple to defeat anti-trust measures. They did not. They lost the Video for Windows lawsuit (Apple v San Francisco Canyon Company, Microsoft, Intel). Buying the non-voting stock was part of the remedy. Microsoft would gladly become a monopoly if they could get away with it.

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