I think I read somewhere that Office is en route to doing the whole gatekeeper signed non-app-store-app thing. Critics of the Mac App Store may see this as evidence as “well, if we need to buy Office directly from MS, why bother with the App Store for anything?”

I see it a little differently. As people are “forced” to use the App Store for system updates, iWork may become more visible. I can’t remember the source, but someone said that Microsoft’s mistake on iOS wasn’t NOT having versions, it was letting us learn we didn’t NEED Office.

The same holds true for Adobe. If not for Final Cut Pro X, Photoshop would be the only Adobe app I need (sorry Pixelmator – you’re getting there though). I prefer Coda to DreamWeaver, Final Cut Pro 7 to Premiere CS 5, and Final Cut Pro 7 to After Effects even (I only ever used After Effects because Premiere prior to Premiere Pro / CS couldn’t keyframe its way out of a wet paper bag). – Sorry, wasn’t meant to be a ‘I still feel burned by Final Cut Pro X’ post… I’ll get back on track…

Back on track, the important App Store holdouts for now are Adobe*, Microsoft*, and VMWare**, none of which I think have a problem with Sandboxing, just want 100% of revenue.

* Adobe and Office currently install a boatload of stuff outside the app bundle and have some shared frameworks between apps. In this day and age this seems kind of messy and too “dll hell” and I’d like to see them clean up a bit. As Adobe has included some titles in the App Store, I expect Microsoft to start with something free like the Remote Desktop Connect client.

** VMWare may lose from features I hate like system wide open-with-this-Windows-app and the Virtual Machine menubar item. But Virtual Machines themselves are the simplest example of the sandboxing content so I doubt architecturally there’d be any difficulty here.

I should probably mention that I stopped using Parallels the day VMWare came out of beta and never looked back. I’m doing the whole subscription thing for CS 6. And the only MS products I use are Remote Desktop Connect and an MSDN operating systems subscription.