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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
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?
Talk about an oxymoron...
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
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.
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.
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.
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).