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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."
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Of course I realize I'm feeding the trolls, but ... this is a service release for Office on Mac OS X. Not Windows.
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
Crap, why am I defending MS?
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?
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
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.
"1000 ways they could have written the code better the first time"
What happened to release early, release often?
Its a painful thing to listen to, this marketing twist. 1000 performance improvements indeed.
What does it mean? Do you list every thing that could possibly "improve" things and count that as a performance improvement? Most companies wouldn't use this line. Its a meaningless marketing statement that deserves a bit of slamming.
What this means to me is they didn't have anything they could point out as an improvement on a bulletted list.
The new 2003 Honda Accord, with 2000 performace improvements over the 2002 model.
Kind of like the difference between Mac OS X and 10.1? Before you Mac users slam something, be reminded of your humble beginings as well.
"In all we've made more than 1,000 performance improvements, updates, and fixes across the whole Officev.X suite. As a result, you'll find that Officev.X is faster, more stable, and more efficient."
Blah, blah... generic... It's new! improved! New package, same great taste!
What did we think? As a result of the fixes, Office would be slower, crash more and be less efficient?
OK, the announcement is not TOTALLY content-free, but one of the things I detest about Microsoft is the absence of any well-structured bug lists that would enable you to tell whether the specific issue that affects you has been fixed. "Previously, there were problems typing accented characters in certain fonts while the Formatting Palette was displayed. These problems have been fixed." What problems WERE they?
Where's the numbered list of 1000?
How do we know it's really 1,000 and not just some marketer's hyperbole for "lots and lots?"
And another thing I hate is Microsoft's continuing pigheaded refusal to call them "bugs."
OK, I feel better now.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Looks like M$ is trying to weed out the pirated copies of Office X by killing all known pirated serial numbers when you install this update. Either that or there are some serious bugs with the installer. See some complaints here.
If you take a look at the release notes, under the Quartz text smoothing heading, you'll notice that you need 10.1.5 in order to to have Quartz work.
Seems like the new version update is finally around the corner.
AnamanFan - Trying to find the Truth, one post at a time.
In other words, 1000 ways they could have written the code better the first time.
Damn straight.
In my day, we wrote programs to include everything we would ever need. Before we needed it.
Why, I even finished a program before I started it and it wasn't buggy.
And the code conformed to standards, before the standards were written. And I say programmers are sissies these days. I don't care what "Intel" or "IBM" says, I'm using the instruction set I had 25 years ago, nothing more, nothing less. Vector processing, I spit in your face. ptoo!
*everything* is Orwellian to cats.
i just downloaded the patch and it was only 12 MB... not bad considering the office 2000 sr 1 was 85 MB. The way i look at it is that we have now entered the beta testing phase, when sr3 is released the product can be deemed stable enough for everyday use.
Later,
Phil
I'm running 10.1.4 with a non pirated version of Office X and I've had no problems with the SR after using it for 30 minutes. But I have yet to try anything difficult...like add clip art for instance.
I heard on Slashdot that Linux is bug-free and never crashes.. er, I mean I heard that Linux 2.6 will be bug-free and never crash.
cpeterso
You can use Trillian instead. That way you can connect to ICQ, AIM, MSN, Yahoo and IRC in one client.
http://www.trillian.cc
Reread the last paragraph. It's more than a troll, it's a flatout joke.
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
You weren't a Mac user in the mid-90s were you?
Word 6:
Slower? Yep!
Crashed more often? Oh yeah!
Less efficient? The media took up space in the dumpster no more or less efficiently than anything else in there. The boxes and manuals had glossy stock covers which meant they had to be thrown away in "mix recyclables" instead of "white paper". So I would say, "Yes, slightly less efficient."
Actually, I agree with all the real points of your post. And it's unfair to the current Mac team at Microsoft to give them too much flack for the marketing droids and the sins of their (hopefully sacked) coding elders. It's just that... well Word 6 was REALLY bad.
That wasn't so much a troll as its parent. If anyone has a link to a download page of a Mac Trillian, by all means, post that one.
id love to. trillian is sweet. but does it run on OS x? nope. sorry folks this ones windows only
Proteus is what you're after. I'd say it's even sweeter than Trillian, and runs on OS X.
I have a couple beefs with the original version of Office X. Does anyone know if they've been fixed in SR1?
1. Text entry in Word doesn't support the normal Mac OS X way of entering characters in other character sets. (This may be tied to the fact that the Mac and Windows versions use a common file format; I don't know. That still doesn't make it good behaviour.)
2. The interface for text entry, etc. follows the Windows conventions, not the Mac OS ones. What I mean by this is such things as how the keys behave when you're scrolling through text on the keyboard, and what happens when you click the mouse below the last line of text - small annoyances, but frustrating to a long-time Mac user. (Whether the Mac conventions are better or not isn't so much the issue; the issue is that, if you're going to develop a Mac OS X app, follow the Mac OS X interface conventions, not the Windows ones!)
...if you are using a pirated serial number.
(sorry, missed the title in the previous post)
___
The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. --Ben Franklin