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MS Office v.X Gets Service Release

Posted by pudge on from the office-software-for-the-home dept.

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."

23 of 74 comments (clear)

  1. Re:another triumph of open source by sweetooth · · Score: 2

    Of course I realize I'm feeding the trolls, but ... this is a service release for Office on Mac OS X. Not Windows.

  2. A Little Unfair by Sentry21 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

    1. Re:A Little Unfair by rjamestaylor · · Score: 5, Insightful
      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....

      --
      -- @rjamestaylor on Ello
    2. Re:A Little Unfair by dimator · · Score: 3

      Jesus, does everyone have to take every little comment by the authors so damn seriously? As soon as I read that line, I said to myself "uh-oh, prepare to read umpteen posts pointing out the obvious fact that software development is hard, cut MS some slack, bla bla bla."

      So predictable, it hurts.

      --
      python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
    3. Re:A Little Unfair by Hard_Code · · Score: 2

      "So predictable, it hurts."

      Yeah, as predictable as superfluous MS bashing...

      --

      It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
    4. Re:A Little Unfair by sg3000 · · Score: 2

      > Jesus, does everyone have to take every
      > little comment by the authors so damn
      > seriously?

      Only if you want your legitimate complaints to be taken seriously. Microsoft does a lot of sleazy things, but needlessly trolling them only increases the chances that one's complaints will be dismissed out of hand.

      --
      Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
    5. Re:A Little Unfair by malahoo · · Score: 2
      uh-oh, prepare to read umpteen posts pointing out the obvious fact

      On the Internet, an incendiary comment meant to evoke obvious, knee-jerk responses is called a troll. Seeing trolls on the font page of *.slashdot is depressing.
      --


      If you're not wasted, the day is.
    6. Re:A Little Unfair by Sentry21 · · Score: 2

      Sorry, I don't consider Access to be a selling point for Office (or, for that matter, any good at all). Filemaker has been the de facto standard on MacOS for ages before Access ever showed up. Microsoft Access support would be a waste of time. Access is also the only 'mainline' MS Office program that wasn't created on the Mac and ported to Windows as well. Perhaps this has something to do with it. Either way, if you're doing databases on MacOS, you want Filemaker.

      If you want something more concrete, how about IE 4 for Mac being more standards compliant than any other browser at the time? Or how about Outlook letting you disable rendering HTML mail, which MS has refused to do on Windows for years.

      --Dan

    7. Re:A Little Unfair by kilgore_47 · · Score: 2

      ...if you are using a pirated serial number. I don't know how they knew, must be some phoning-home taking place, because the serial number (cd key) I was using is owned by someone I knew and I don't think theres more than a few people using it. I installed the update, and now all my Office apps ask for a cd-key on startup. I tried many numbers from a certain database, and all failed. I eventually went back to using the old version (with sudo ipfw add deny udp from any to any 2222 to block it from detecting other coppies with the same key on my network).

      I decided today that even if I could afford Office, I wouldn't. Disabling working software because the numbers don't match up is some lowdown dirty shit.

      Fuck you, bill gates: I'm excercising my power as a consumer by going out of my way to use your software without paying. It's difficult, but it's worth it knowing that you won't get a penny of my money.

      --
      ___
      The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. --Ben Franklin
  3. goes without saying, but.... by TRACK-YOUR-POSITION · · Score: 2, Funny
    that's 1000 ways they could have made it better the first time--if you were willing to wait until now to get the product.

    Crap, why am I defending MS?

  4. writing code better the first time by stefanlasiewski · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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."
  5. Will all those... by Violet+Null · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. Honestly? by mnordstr · · Score: 2

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

    What happened to release early, release often?

    1. Re:Honestly? by Zapman · · Score: 2

      On increadibly rare occasions, I have written a program or script that has worked 100% right, immediatly. At most, these have topped out at 100 lines or so.

      I am always shocked when this happens, and usually dislocate my shoulder patting myself on the back when it does happen. :-)

      So, what exactly are the odds that something that is at least a million lines of code will work right the first time?

      --
      Zapman
    2. Re:Honestly? by mnordstr · · Score: 2

      Exactly.
      And it was 1000 performance improvements. Who the hell writes 100% perfect, fully optimized and all features present on the first release code? Not even God managed that, it's called evolution!

  7. Yes, but where's the LIST of SPECIFICS? by dpbsmith · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "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!

  8. Microsoft Killing Pirates? by dasspunk · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  9. BAH! by EnVisiCrypt · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.
  10. Re:another triumph of open source by david+duncan+scott · · Score: 2

    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

  11. Re:A key look to 10.1.5 comming REAL soon.. by glenmark · · Score: 3, Informative

    No, no, no... Quartz works with or without the OS update. That is the graphics layer in OS X. The OS update is required to utilize some of the Quartz enhancements in Quartz Extreme...

    --
    *** Quantum Mechanics: The Dreams of Which Stuff is Made ***
  12. Re:New version of MSN Messenger, too. by linuxbert · · Score: 2

    id love to. trillian is sweet. but does it run on OS x? nope. sorry folks this ones windows only

  13. Re:Microsoft? Release an inferior update? Never! by dpbsmith · · Score: 2

    I was a Mac user in February, 1984. Yeah, I know... I was really slow to "get it."

    I used Word 1.x (good), Word 3.x (totally different from 1.x but good) (yes, the marketroids were already in full swing, there wasn't any version 2... well, I forget what the stupid reason was), Word 4.x (lackluster tweak to 3), Word 5.x (pretty good). I skipped 6 altogether. I've found and continue to find Office 98 very frustrating, though not as bad as 6. One of my frustrations is that the main thing that would tempt me to upgrade to the new Office would be a solid bug list that would convince me that the worst annoyances in 98 have actually been fixed...

    --

    "How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!

  14. DON'T INSTALL THE UPDATE... by kilgore_47 · · Score: 2

    ...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