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Microsoft Works To Find Its Place In Mac OS X
eggboard writes "In the Seattle Times, published right across the lake from Microsoft headquarters, I argue that Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit (MacBU) has produced some wonderfully engineered Mac OS X software, but they're generating most of the resentment they get because they miss the details: no Palm sync months after it should have come out; six-year-old broken features in Word; no common format for mail among Outlook, Entourage, and Outlook Express. If the MacBU could fix things as well as they write new features, their Mac customers would have a much better outlook." Tim O'Reilly recently had his own thoughts after meeting with people at MacBU, and meanwhile, MacBU also released Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac OS X. What's the real future of Microsoft on Mac OS X? MacBU's marketing director told O'Reilly to reserve judgment: "Watch us for another six months."
Your website is completely broken.
--
Twoflower
Did anyone else think this story headline was announcing the port of Microsoft Works to OS X? :) There's an old app..
Man, that wierded me out.
Put out really buggy software that infuriates mac users -- aside from the subconcious associations of frustration associated with Macs, new users will also reject Macs as inferior -- "they can't even run the same applications without crashing"
Not that I'm implying Macs _arn't_ inferior, of course...
Not one of the better trolls I've seen.
Quite uninspired and cliché.
Oh, don't mind me. I'm just doing my part to get a release of Outlook for OSX that'll render the custom forms I've created. It's my mantra. It's my prayer. Perhaps someone at MacBU is listening...
Custom forms, custom forms, custom forms...
Consigned to flames of woe.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but microsoft has every reason to use their software to sabotage OS X and make it unstable. ;)
Repeal the DMCA!
I have recently reached a sort of uneasy detente with Microsoft Word 10 for Mac OS X. My co-workers like to use Word for everything from email to bookmaking, but I employ it only to write copy. The actual page layout and typesetting happens in InDesign. It's a good system.
But Word... Word is one big frustration. I have come to live with it peacefully by turning off damn near everything. "Check spelling while you type?" No, thank you. "Background pagination?" At a price of 30% of my CPU all the time? Nuh-uh. I've set the "Normal" stylesheet to 10 point Courier on 24 pt leading and turned off all the toolbars. I divide my time about 50/50 between banging out copy in normal view and structuring documents in outline view. Periodically, for no reason I can put my finger on, Word decides that I really want to work in page layout view, but that's easy enough to fix. If TextEdit.app had stylesheets*, I'd be in business.
All this can be yours, for the low, low price of five hundred bucks. Sheesh.
* The only reason I'm using Word is because you can import a styled Word document into InDesign and let InDesign's stylesheet override the formatting in the Word document. So you can set your heading and subheading styles for a long document (I write a lot of 100+-page proposals) in Word, and then let InDesign apply appropriate formatting automatically. It's a system that works really well. As long as Word behaves, that it.
I actually find Microsoft Macintosh software to be of fairly decent quality. The real problem lies elsewhere.
Specifically, MS leaves out certain functionality for "strategic" reasons that essentially leave the Mac platform lacking in certain specific areas. Outlook, anyone? Java-enabled Web browsing anyone? There are other examples as well. What you end up with is well written software with what I call "strategic holes" in it.
I seriously hope that Microsoft delivers a more highly compatible web browser and an OS X Outlook client soon. Judging from the past, however, there's no reason to suspect that they will except the vague "watch us for six months" comment.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
Dear MacBU, if you read this (and I know you do), please fix that stupid MSN Messenger 3 for OS X. It's slow as hell. Sometimes I have to wait ~30 seconds before thinking of writing an answer to a correspondant.
Note: I know iChat & co. work better and are made especially for Mac but my contacts are using MESSenger. And I won't change of friends because of the OS/IM they use.
Instant Karma's gonna get you, Gonna knock you right on the head (John Lennon, 1970)
Yeah, me too. The first thing I thought was: "Why on earth are they digging up that dead horse?"
Been a long time since I even saw a Works file, let alone used the program. Must be close to fifteen years now since I pilfered a copy of Works from the Comp Sci labs at me old alma mater -- easy enough to do when it all fit on one floppy disk!
...instead of waiting years for software like Microsoft Works to come out for the Mac?
Oh wait, Mac users still won't get to experience the joy that is Microsoft Works. Sorry, I misinterpreted the headline.
Well if Mr. Gates doesn't want to share this treasure of home productivity with Mac users, I don't blame him.
In spite of his constant hawking of his "OS X Missing Manual" in his articles, Tim O'Reilly brings up an important point on the subject:
[Apple sold about 800,000 Macs last quarter, so Microsoft's whining that they've only sold 300,000 copies of Office X this year seems only to show how spoiled they've gotten. ("We're only getting 20% penetration. These bozos must be doing something wrong!")]
Think of it this way: Microsoft's share in the Mac word processing niche is larger than Apple's share in the personal computing market by a factor of three to four, and this is with Apple giving away AppleWorks on all of its consumer models. And Office ain't cheap ($435 new, $260 to upgrade)!
Admittedly, however, if you listened to Steve Jobs at the last MacWorld Expo, you'd've heard that even *new* Mac buyers are using OS 9 as their boot-up OS nearly 40% (iirc) of the time. An OS X only product is going to feel a pinch in the transition period.
Regardless, Microsoft is doing well on Mac. Their browser's on the desktop, their Office suite has been updated or purchased anew by 15% of OS X users and older versions sit on many more machines. I haven't understood the whole Office vs. OpenOffice threats recently -- Apple needs Microsoft to keep people switching and Microsoft needs Apple if only to provide the semblence of a commercial rival. Not bad for a division that's tucked in with "the consumer division [not the Office division] that makes mice, trackballs, WebTV, and the Xbox".
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
Nuts, I nearly bought Offive v.X for Entourage and the Palm Sync (academic, so I wouldn't be spending $500 on sync software). But then it came out that it was blowing pdbs up to fill your memory (or some such).
That's a pretty fatal blow, for the moment, and since 10.2 is going to have iSync...
Of course, I'm an exception: I use LaTeX and noweb to write papers, and AppleWorks' spreadsheet is enough for my non-scientific use.
But the truth is, I need working functionality a lot more than I need another whiz-bang feature; I don't use Office for the same reason I don't troll for new software on freshmeat; I don't feel safe putting my data in their hands.
--Matthew
Is for InDesign to accept an XML document. I've never used it, but it looks like InDesign does have the capability you need... At least that's what this page says.
I'm guessing you could write XML in a text editor and dump it into InDesign. The problem you describe (turn off all the bells and whistles and just give me the outlining) seems made for a markup language solution. Trying to separate content from presentation with Word will make you crazy.
Since it appears that InDesign can create an XML template for you, you could then fill in the content with a good text editor (like jEdit, BBEdit, Vi, or Emacs).
Of course, XML is anoother ball of worms, but I'd rather use a text editor and XML rather than struggle with all the 'features' of Micros0ft Word.
My father is a blogger.
Dude, I feel so sorry for you. I feel more sorry for your users.
I once had to use a system created on Outlook custom forms. I sure hope you don't end up with a large data set. I sure hope your users don't have to see these forms very often. There are a million different ways you could do the same thing better. Outlook forms suck.
My school wants everyone to use Outlook/Express (it is an online class and they will only offer tech support for Outlook/Express). I am using OSX and didn't want to boot up OS9.x whenever I wanted do my school work so I started using Entourage. It is a pretty decent product and it works great. The only problem I have is, it like all of MS Office products for OSX that I have used in the Office suite, is that they crash a lot. Word and PowerPoint have both locked up my iMac solid. No other programs have done that to me since I upgraded to OS10.1. I like the features of each and they nailed the almighty "look and feel". They just crash -- a lot. And yes IE5 is very slow, especially on sites like /.
That is my two cents.
Yeah. They suck. Here's my story.
The "database" - which is what the users call it and the moment I heard this I knew I was doomed - is huge. It's also a vital part of our company's scheduling process. I actually inherited just the fact that I "had" to do it in Outlook, a boss told me to. I did create the whole shootin' match from the ground up.
(An aside, if Visual Basic is Budwieser, and Visual Basic for Applications is Bud Light, what is Visual Basic Scripting Edition? Water?)
I've already lost our entire Exchange database, so I'm kind of like a soldier who's seen the bleak underbelly of war. I've already fought with permissions on the folder that uses this form. They were changed by a visiting MCSE *on* *the* *virtual* *drive* - you Exchange 2000 admins know what I mean. Oh, don't do that by the way.
I have been many Exchange places and done many Exchange and custom form things. The end result is pretty cool - a nice sorted form that shows which jobs in a manufacturing plant are going to run on which date and on which machine.
Yeah, well...so we run the entire plant on it. I realize the weaknesses and so does the rest of the company...now...after the database went south.
And anyway, gives me something to do. Thus the sig:
Consigned to flames of woe.
It's pretty amusing what the MacBU does and where they reside. But then, Microsoft has never been against the Macintosh--in fact, Microsoft created Word and Excel for use on Macintosh first, long before Windows was developed.
They do great work. Since Office 98, the MacBU has restored my opinion of Microsoft's support of the OS. While the products do suffer from the typical bloat common in MS software, they don't get in the way as nastily as in their Windows counterparts.
Further, Mac Microsoft products rarely suffer from the relentless ActiveX, VB, macro, and Win32 viruses, trojans, and other malware because the applications provide very limited or no support for these items.
The only real flaw in the MacBU (and this isn't probably in their control) is pricing. They would sell more Office units with a lower price, guaranteed.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
The -only- reason I keep Word on my system is "grammar check". Other than that, it's features aren't something that isn't offered by other W. Processing apps. Now, what I would like to see (or hear of) is a Mac OS X grammar service. For all of OS X apps, anywhere. At least Cocoa apps. That would kick. Just like the spelling service helps a lot! Sorry, that probably is off topic, but I've been looking a -long- time for an OS X grammar service. Hrm.
Back in the late 90s I was an engineer on MS Works at Microsoft.
The reason MS Works doesn't come out for the Mac is because Apple Works kicked its butt.
Microsoft tried and tried to compete against Apple in this segment, but was completely unable to.
So, they stopped selling MS Works for the Mac. Not that I'm surprised, after that experience, now I *know* why MS products suck.
As with anything, though, people choose to see this as a failing of the Mac and not Microsoft.
But on a level playing field, Microsoft lost. (which actually happens regularly if you know the industry.)
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
if mac would completey drop all of their microsoft apps. it would be nice to have a system that is free of microsoft products without having to deal with the hassel of Linux or BSD. not that there is anything wrong with Linux or BSD, but not everyone wants to spend hours staring at a terminal.
Mac OS with no MS products, a user friendly dream!
jEdit is a medium-sucky text editor that does XML pretty well. (When I say medium-sucky, I mean it's a Java app, with all the pluses and minuses). It's freely downloadable and open source. It's no XML Spy, but it's much better than BBEdit's XML support, and it's cheaper than either.
If you use an external DTD, it will validate against it on the fly and even provide context-sensitive tag completion. It makes using DocBook tolerable, so I'm pretty sure it would make a more stringent schema easier to use.
Anyhow, I feel for you. I'm currently working on a medium-complex project (where I'm automatically generating tables from queries on a database) that I wrote the pages in XHTML and the scripts in Python. It was the only option where I felt I had control over the presentation (But then again, I'm good with raw XML).
I might have to check out InDesign for future projects...
My father is a blogger.
But since it's not in their short term bottom line extend the monopoly best interest, fat chance of it happening. Sort of like their hard coded sabotaged LDAP query in MS-Outlook.
I use TextEdit when I can, because MS-Word is too slow (IMHO) even on a G4. I wish I could run Word5 without having to go into "Classic" mode. If the source code were out for the older versions, then they could be ported to OS X or KDE and make import filters for the newer formats. MS-Word sort of hit apogee at MS-Word 2.0 for Windows and MS-Word 5 for Macintosh.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
One of the reasons I switched to Mac was to get
dualboot Linux too
Bad enough they got IE in OSX, don't enourage them to add more.
Apple has a good thing going at the moment, don't let Microsoft break that too.
- MugginsM
All credit to Microsoft, the removed the conduit from the web site as soon as this bug came to light, and informed users of the problem while it was under investigation.
It was bug fixed and re-releaseled this month at http://www.microsoft.com/mac/.
Microsoft's mac software department is pretty on the ball (though I wish Internet Explorer on OS was better threaded and had a few of the annoying display bugs fixed).
I don't know why they didn't just call it Terminal Services Client for the Macintosh, since that's pretty much what it is.
They are pushing it hard as a means to use Outlook on the Mac, since development on a native Outlook client for OS X has not even begun, AFAIK.
I tried it out the other night, and on my 500MHz iBook over an AirPort connection, it feels significantly faster than it does on my XP Pro Duron 850MHz box over a 100Mbps wired Ethernet connection. It can also take over the full screen, which I can't seem to get it to do on my XP box with the the actual client application (though I can get it fullscreen if I go in through the web front end).
It's a much nicer solution than my previous one, running the 16-bit Terminal Services Client in Win3.11 within Virtual PC.
Still, a native Outlook would be much better. Hop to it, MacBU!
~Philly
From http://www.microsoft.com/mac/DOWNLOAD/OFFICEX/palm sync.asp:
There's no information under "News and Updates" about a re-release either...
--Matthew
Hmmm
Microsoft:
Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac OS X
Relased: 7/17/2002
Apple:
Remote Desktop
Released: 3/14/2002
Methinks Microsoft needs to change their product name.