It was very interesting to see that Apple has acquired SchemaSoft, a company that specializes in data munging … getting data translated between different formats, etc.
I’ve met and talked to the the CEO of SchemaSoft at an XML seminar half a year ago – a very clueful guy.
If memory serves, Schemasoft has done a lot of work getting data into and out of Microsoft formats, particularly Word. My best guess is that Apple wants to use some of their technology to make Pages documents compatible with Word.
Which leads one to wonder: is Apple preparing for a time when Microsoft Office for Mac will no longer be available for Mac?
It’s interesting to note that SchemaSoft’s website is now down … replaced by this image:
Of course, a somewhat mangled page is still visible in Google’s cache.