On Apr 3, 2009, at 6:40 pm, Savian wrote:

> I have never seen OpenOffice.org in the field so not sure if there is > any market there.

I don't know if there's a market for OO.o itself - what I want is its ability to read and write Microsoft Office files. If my understanding is correct, it should be possible to run OO.o on Unix and create a Excel or Word file - not XML that Office knows how to read, but an actual binary-compatible file. And it should be possible to make a programming interface available to the data step so that you could do the equivalent of creating an Office document with .Net - but on a Unix box, or even a mainframe.

The ExcelXP tagset is great, but it doesn't do everything I might possibly want.

> I also don't see SAS tying themselves closer to Windows. Can you > provide an example?

Enterprise Guide is available only for Windows - that's probably the biggest example. Various programs in the BI suite are available only for Windows (though I think some of them are cross-platform).

On the other hand, JMP is available for both Windows and Mac OS X, and some iPhone apps were shown at SAS Global Forum.

-- Jack Hamilton jfh@alumni.stanford.org Videtis illam spirare libertatis auram

On Apr 3, 2009, at 6:40 pm, Savian wrote:

> On Apr 3, 4:42 pm, j...@STANFORDALUMNI.ORG (Jack Hamilton) wrote: >> On Apr 2, 2009, at 9:32 am, Savian wrote: >> >>> New features in languages force rethinking on how to do a given >>> problem. For example, C# 4.0 will now support more dynamic features >>> due to pressure from Python developers who insisted on more dynamic >>> syntax. The ease of use of Excel using .NET should put pressure on >>> SAS >>> to better support Office. >> >> What I would like is built-in support for OpenOffice.org, and in >> particular an API that's called by ODS and callable explicitly in the >> data step. >> >> SAS Institute is tying itself more and more to the Windows >> architecture, and I don't think it's good in the long term to do >> that. I would prefer them to stick to solutions that can be >> implemented on multiple platforms, not just Windows. >> >> -- >> Jack Hamilton >> j...@alumni.stanford.org >> Videtis illam spirare libertatis auram > > Jack, > > I have never seen OpenOffice.org in the field so not sure if there is > any market there. > > I also don't see SAS tying themselves closer to Windows. Can you > provide an example? > > Microsoft is also doing a lot of things that cross platforms. > Silverlight, for example, runs on multiple platforms including Mac, > Linux, Windows and all major browsers. > > Alan > Savian