MS Office v.X Gets Service Release

techwolf writes "Microsoft put out a patch to Office v.X that touts more than 1000 performance improvements. In other words, 1000 ways they could have written the code better the first time."

Comments

A Little Unfair

[Sentry21]

In other words, 1000 ways they could have written the code better the first time.

Come on, this is totally unfair. Office v.X is widely considered to be a better office suite than its Windows counterpart (it really is excellent work), there's no forced registration with Microsoft, and without an office suite, OS X would have had very, very little going for it for a long time. It was rushed out the door so Microsoft could showcase the new Office X for OS X, show that it wasn't a monopoly by providing products and compatibility across platforms, and to help launch OS X.

That being said, who gets everything right on the first try? The Linux kernel? Slashcode? Apache? XFree?

Yes, it could have been written better the first time, but no one gets it right the first time. They had the benefit of real-world profiling, of testing on OS X, X.1, and probably X.2 at this point, they can see where things can be improved, they can see real-world issues with OS X, or new features/code/libraries that can be used and abused, and they released a patch. This sounds exactly like what any other software company would do, except other software companies don't have this much code behind them.

I'm all about bashing MS, but come on people, don't be unfair about it.

--Dan

Re:A Little Unfair

[rjamestaylor]

Hear, hear!

• In other words, 1000 ways they could have written the code better the first time.

A programmer didn't write that comment. No one in a technical field wrote that comment. Probably only a ditch-digger could write that comment--I take it back, sometimes ditch diggers have to make changes, too. No, only a person who has never attempted anything of any complexity could have written such an insipid comment such as that.

I like Office for X, the first version of Office for a Unix system. The biggest complaint I have is MS still cannot connect directly to Exchange with Entourage so that Mac OS Xer's can manage group calendars, etc. That's the rub in my opinion. I wonder if it's really an engineering problem or a marketing one....

writing code better the first time

[stefanlasiewski]

1000 ways they could have written the code
better the first time.

Oh come on, are you complaining because MS had bugs in their program? All programs have bugs.

How many bugs were fixed on the way to Gnome 2.0 or Mozilla 1.0 ? Thousands! Are you accusing the developers of those products for not doing it right the first time?

Will all those...

[Violet Null]

Who write perfect code the first time around please raise your hands?

(counts hands)

Ok, will all those whose perfect code consists of a 'Hello World' application please put their hands down?

Why, look. No more hands up.