Cross platform: How they do it?

[Andrew L. Gould]

On Friday 16 April 2004 11:49 pm, Joel Hammer wrote:
> I am no programmer.
>
> Could someone tell me why staroffice can make its products
> compatible with windows and linux and unix (mac, too?),
> but MS can't make its Office Suite cross platform?
>
> What do you give up in making cross platform software? Does
> the software run slower?
>
> Joel

I'm not a programmer either; but I'll take the risk of being wrong:

MS can make MS Office for other platforms.  In fact, MS Office is available 
for Mac OS X.  Outlook is replaced with Entourage; but Word, Powerpoint and 
Excel are there.  By making MS Office available for non-Windows platforms, MS 
risks losing license fees for MS Windows.  One of the key barriers for Linux 
on the desktop is the absence of popular applications with brand name 
recognition/loyalty.  By making a Linux version of MS Office, they would be 
removing this barrier.

I have a question for the programmers on the list:  It's my understanding that 
Perl, Python and Java (and Ruby?) manage memory allocation for the 
programmer.  Does this impact the programmers' ability to control the 
efficiency of the application?

Thanks,

Andrew Gould