[ls -al]

Thinksecret just published a story of Apple purchasing SchemaSoft <http://www.thinksecret.com/news/0503schemasoft.html>

This should be front page news, as it promises to bring to iWorks/OS X a lot of goodies:

1. Better MS Office, Quark readers and writers <http://www.schemasoft.com/tools/extract.html>. Hopefully, Apple will make this available to all developers not just iWorks and iApps.

From their website:

[quote] The SchemaSoft Microsoft Office Readers and Writers provide detailed access to documents. Microsoft Office documents are complex containers of a variety of data. Our libraries expose all of the document's structural information, while hiding the complexity of its physical layout. This allows your application to import, modify and export Office documents without losing any of the original content.

Efficient - Our Readers and Writers use a highly optimized streaming model. Even the largest Office documents can be processed quickly and with a low impact on the memory usage of your application.

Robust - Our Readers and Writers were all developed using the rigorous Quality Assurance process for which SchemaSoft is renowned. In addition, they have been extensively tested and are widely used. The Readers recognize all recent office formats and most legacy formats.[\quote]

2. Better search capabilities, since Spotlight can potentially take advantage of legacy file formats.

3. Support for OASIS (open standards format) built right into every app! This is freaking cool! Schemasoft has software for Word to DocBook conversion. For those who don't know Docbook is the preferred XML format of OASIS

4. Support for SVG and hopefully MathML. Among other things big win for Safari!

5. Potential editing of PDF documents.

6. On the fly conversion of XML schemas from one format to another... hopefully this will allow for writing a conversion XSLT? from Keynote/Pages to and from Open Office....


This is big news indeed!

[hmurchison2001]

Yes I read through the Schema Soft documents. Read a little of the White Paper on docuement semantics preservation. Good stuff, Apple should be able to do a lot with this code. Since XML is becoming so popular I see the reach of this acquisition going a lot further than conversions.

I'm pretty eager to see what comes from this.

[Millennium]

Originally posted by hmurchison2001:
Since XML is becoming so popular I see the reach of this acquisition going a lot further than conversions.

I'm not sure how, seeing as how this company seems to be pretty much in the conversion business. That said, don't underestimate the usefulness of a good set of converters. Even if that's all that comes out of this, it would be a Good Thing. Apple has always had to try and do the interoperability thing, since it's never been "compatible", per se. Something like this could help immensely as far as that goes.

[Visnaut]

It could also signal that Apple is preparing for the day when Microsoft decides to axe Office for Mac. An unlikely scenario, since Office:mac rakes in plenty of cash for MS, but perhaps the brass at each company knows something we don't.

[hmurchison2001]

Originally posted by Visnaut:
It could also signal that Apple is preparing for the day when Microsoft decides to axe Office for Mac. An unlikely scenario, since Office:mac rakes in plenty of cash for MS, but perhaps the brass at each company knows something we don't.

Hell why wait for MS to even think about axing Mac Office? When I look at Pages I'm thinking that it's perhaps not the only office suite that Apple may have. iWork is decidedly "consumer". Something leads me to believe that Apple may still be working on something more robust for businesses. Why buy Schema Soft if iWork is their new product. Chances are the typical iWork customer wouldn't need that many conversions from Office.

I think that maybe at Macworld San Fran 2006 we might see the birth of an actual business strategy from Apple led by a groupware app based on a much stronger iCal and biz quality office suite with excellent conversions thanks to the Schema Soft team. iWorks is just a run through. For some reason I'm not too worried about losing Mac office. When you look at it...Microsoft reducing the amount of Office copies isn't a good thing with OpenOffice 2.0 breathing down their necks. They days where Microsoft wielded .doc like a club are fast approaching an end.

XML and OASIS standards are hitting them from one end and adobe and PDF are hitting them from the other. I figured the next Apple acquisition would tell us a little more about what Apple's future plans are. Looks like they have potentially changed their focus from Video to productivity. We'll see what other companies they acquire in the next 18 months. Something tells me we're just getting started.