Attention, those of you who were all worried that Microsoft might abandon the Mac platform once its five-year technology agreement with Apple expires in August: now that you've heaved a gigantic sigh of relief at the company's not-legally-binding assurances that the Mac version of Office will continue "as long as the business case makes sense," we've got just one teensy little question for you. If Office for the Mac went away this fall, would that really be such a terrible thing?

Yes, we know it's a dumb question, but even though we know the answer, we still feel better having asked it. Obviously, if Office for the Mac disappeared, our platform would have a really tough time holding onto the little shred of the business market to which it currently clings. But we're still having trouble getting our heads around the fact that Office is such a monumentally important piece of software. Here's why: according to a CNET article, Microsoft is scraping together a "modest update" for Office v.X, which will be available in "late May or early June"; reportedly this "free download" (oooh, how generous!) will introduce "improved text rendering" and a couple of other features, plus-- and this is the bit that has us asking stupid questions, here-- "more than 1,000 bug fixes."

Now, you can choose to interpret that information in a stunningly glass-half-full manner, e.g. "Wow, Microsoft must be super-good at programming to fix all those bugs, plus they must really like me to be giving me this update for free." Our own interpretation is slightly less Pollyanna in tone: "Wow, Microsoft must be super-sloppy to release a product with that many bugs in the first place, and the very fact that people are freaking out because this $500 software package whose bug count runs upwards of four digits might disappear someday is the very definition of the word 'monopoly.'" C'mon, any company that didn't wield monopoly power would be laughed out of business overnight if it tried to charge half a grand for a suite of office productivity applications so full of bugs it qualifies as a bona fide ecosystem.

Over a thousand bug fixes... man, if this is a "modest" update, we'd sure hate to run into a "major" one in a dark alley some night. But actually, relatively speaking, a thousand bugs isn't all that bad. After all, it pales in comparison to the 63,000 bugs that Microsoft admitted were in Windows 2000 when that product first hit the market. See? We can be glass-half-full people, too!