From a MacWorld.com article on "Mac native OpenOffice gets shot in the arm from Sun":
"Some may ask: Why is Sun joining the Mac porting project? If you look around at conferences and airport lounges, you will notice that more and more people are using Apple notebooks these days. Apple has a significant market share in the desktop space. We are supporting this port because of the interest and activity of the community wanting this port," wrote Lohmann.

Man, tell me about it. I recently went to a convention on using digital media in education, and was surprised to see so many in the audience sporting not only MacBooks, but MacBooks for which they'd paid the "Apple black tax" or MacBook Pros. They've been steadily gaining, and now seem to have hit the proverbial tipping point.

What were the audience members using the beasts for? Browsing the free wireless while the speakers spoke, of course. (Admittedly, many were looking at the conference's web page, and I think I caught one guy using Emacs on a MacBook running Windows; go figure.)

The only exception I saw/recall that wasn't related to the A/V system being used to record the event? Somebody at the back had a Dell XPS laptop glowing, which was right tacky. I never realized those letters not only looked like they were glowing in the ads, but that they actually do light up. I realize they're "for gaming," but come on...

One might determine from that comment that I'm a laptop fashionista myself. It's true. I brought my Clamshell iBook 300 in with me. If everyone in the room had shelled out for a clamshell and donated the balance to education, would there have even been a conference? (Well, of course, but at least one more scholar would have had pretty decent funding for next year. And it would have been more difficult to use iChat A/V while browsing.)

In any event, I do wonder about Sun pumping dough into OpenOffice for OS X rather than into X11/OS X integration from which even more would benefit. I wonder how difficult it'd be to tease X11 apps to look more Mac-like, so there isn't as obvious a reason for a traditional Mac user to feel disoriented when they call them up. When I used The Gimp on OS X, the grey background and three-button mouse assumptions were pretty off-putting.

Still, if X11 remains useful in current *NIX development (and I've admittedly not kept up), why not simply make your X11 version of OpenOffice work that much better xplatform?

I guess these are the words of a Java-phile who hasn't figured out that Java on the desktop hasn't and won't work (beyond perhaps Limewire), as my confidence in X11 being The Right Way to port applications crossplatform smacks of using Java and Swing (Java's GUI widget toolset). It's a shame Sun killed Watson; they had something going there. Just another case of the ivory tower mentality conflicting with typical, nonprofessional PC end-users. Seriously, Sun should fund an Xbox equivalent so that they could build an out-of-house, but Java-dependent, repoire [sp] with consumers.