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....

Re:A Little Unfair

[dimator]

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.

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.

Yes, but where's the LIST of SPECIFICS?

[dpbsmith]

"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.

Microsoft Killing Pirates?

[dasspunk]

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.

BAH!

[EnVisiCrypt]

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!

Re:A key look to 10.1.5 comming REAL soon..

[glenmark]

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...