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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."
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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.
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?
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
InDesign does take XML input. I've tried it. Works really well.
The roadblock there is that everybody in the company already has a license to use Word, but nobody has a license for an XML editor. Plus, everybody already has Word installed, while nobody has an XML editor installed. Finally, everybody knows how to use Word (at least to the minimal extent that they can use outline mode), but nobody knows how to use an XML editor.
I agree that XML would be a good answer here, but it doesn't offer us anything that we can't do already, and presents us with a number of small to medium challenges that would have to be overcome.
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.
You mean TextEdit.app? Sure, go right ahead and try to convince people to write XML by hand in a text editor when what they really want is Word. That's gonna go over huge.
welcome to EmbraceDegradeExtingusih XP - M$ new strategy, not totally unlike EmbraceExtendExtinguish, except this version doesn't crash, we promise.
cat
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
I tried jEdit. Double-clicked it, went to get a soda came back. It still wasn't done initializing. That was the end of the experiment.
InDesign isn't perfect. It sets type like nobody's business, but it has no facilities for handling things like cross-references or automatic index generation. What I really need is FrameMaker, only with less suck.
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.
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.
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
Since they are coworkers and not clients you could probably get away with sending it back with a link to http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments. html
In my experience, you can never get away with sending anybody a link to anything with the word "philosophy" in it, particularly if it has anything to do with Gnu. If the recipient has never heard of Gnu, they're going to wonder who the hell these people think they are. And if they have heard of Gnu, well, then you've got a whole other problem to deal with.
Word and PowerPoint are useful tools. They're not perfect, and there is a trend toward using them for purposes to which they're not suited. But they're useful.
OTOH if you want to make a stand against them sending that link out usually works preety well.
Make a stand on your own time. At my company, we use the tools we need to get the job done, regardless of RMS's political opinions on them. (Is how I would respond to any coworker who suggested the same thing that you suggested.)
You are on a Mac what are you going to do when they send you access files?
Depends. If it's junk, it's junk, and I throw it away. If it's important, then I damn well get my hands on a PC with a copy of Access on it.
In the business world, there is no room for dissent on this issue. If you want to draw a line in the sand and say, "I will not read Word or Powerpoint attachments," that's your concern. But if you pull that kind of crap in a business context, you'd better be prepared to lose a customer. Customers send my company RFPs in every format known to man. You know what we do? We read 'em. Every one, cover to cover. I don't care if it shows up on our doorstep in cuneiform engraved on clay tablets; we find a way to read it. Because those documents are where our money comes from.