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."

Comments

Re:Make blender drinks

[foobar104]

I got a kick out of that, too, when I read this article yesterday. The only conclusion that makes sense is that Glenn is talking about performance. He says,

The Mac version is far superior to the Windows releases of Internet Explorer except in one area: rendering HTML pages. Pages with 150 kilobytes of data with a few tables can take 20 to 30 seconds to display. Other pages can halt the entire browser for a minute. Other similar programs have no such rendering problem.

In other words, IE 5 for Mac renders the pages well, but it doesn't render them quickly. I'll go along with that. Of course, the OS X version of IE is saddled with other problems, but there's always OmniWeb for that.

Ah, Word

[foobar104]

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.

Re:Ah, Word

[jhealy1024]

I've set the "Normal" stylesheet to 10 point Courier on 24 pt leading and turned off all the toolbars . . . 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.

Have you considered LaTeX? It lets you write your docs in a simple text editor (which is pretty much what you've turned Word into) and then apply the correct formatting, pagination, endnotes, citations, fonts, figures, and layout later.

It works great in Mac OS X, and has a few good Mac OS-native frontends. It produces PS or PDF, and doesn't cost a dime! The markup language takes a little getting used to, but there are some excellent books available, or you can use a WYSIWYG front-end.

Too used to a monopoly?

[mactari]

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".

Re:quality high but other problems

[feldsteins]

But what kind of business strategy would lead a company to intentionally leave holes in software?

What we're talking about is deliberate incompatibility. Whether it's the omission of features or the addition of ones that break compatiblity, it's all the same. Case in point - Microsoft wanted nothing more than for Java to fail. They figured if the Web browser became a "platform" unto itself it could jeapardize the Windows monopoly. So they impliment Java...only they kinda break it. Deliberately. See where I'm going with this?

And actually in that scenario they added features that would break compatibility with standard java. When asked why they said "because that's what our customers want." In reality what they were doing was the "extend" part of the embrace, extend and extinguish strategy.

One might ask "what sense does it make for a company to make products that deliberately have problems?" Unfortunately there are indeed answers to that question that make good "bottom line" business sense. Even more unfortunately, it retards the progress of the entire industry.

Re:you know what would be cool...

[foobar104]

Actually, you've kinda got it backwards. My company is fairly small-- a couple dozen people spread across three continents in lots of tiny offices-- but we're divided about 50/50 between Mac and Windows users. This used to cause a problem, because the Windows guys insisted on sending out Word and other MS Office documents as email attachments and so on.

We recently bit down hard and bought about 10 copies of MS Office v. X. Now our Mac guys have perfect (at least so far, touch wood) interoperability with our Windows guys. And because we're all using OS X, we also enjoy a much greater degree of reliability.

So, in my opinion, Mac OS X with Office v. X (when it's needed) is a perfect user-friendly dream. It was a fairly expensive one, though.

Re:Bug fixed (see Mactopia web site)

[@madeus]

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).