I've finally gone and done it. After endless aggrevation, I have removed Microsoft Word X from my digital toolbox. And while I still occasionally use Excel, I have moved almost excusively to AppleWorks 6.2.4 as my daily productivity tool.

Why? Well, it reads and writes to Word and Excel file formats. It's not intrusive. And it doesn't crash with the dramatic regularity that Word does on OS X.

Also, it came bundled on my Macs.

I had considered using

I asked BEA's CEO if the relationship between his company and Sun had changed any since Sun started bundling its own application server with Solaris (Sun also bundles BEA's Weblogic with some Solaris servers). He said, “If I thought a hardware company could make good software, I could just put my feet up on my desk and relax.” He also said that he had tried to talk Scott McNealy out of putting so much energy into the Sun ONE products, to no avail.

But he said the relationship hadn't changed, and that things were great with Sun. However, in an answer to a seperate question, he revealed that 20% of BEA's license sales were for the Linux platform now. And it wasn't a Sun exec doing a keynote on the first day; it was Carly Fiorina.