Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft's Mac Business Unit
An anonymous reader writes "Today's Seattle Post-Intelligencer has an interesting piece on the folks who work at the Mac Business Unit for Microsoft."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
"Far from it. But as one observer put it, it's as if they were working for a division of General Motors making parts for Volkswagens." I predict that this will be repeated when Linux is mainstream on the desktop.
But the people in the Mac BU take noticeable pride in Office for Mac as a product in its own right, not merely a translation of Windows Office to the Mac operating system. Office 2004 for Mac, for example, includes a number of features not available in the Windows version of Office, such as a "project center" in the Entourage e-mail program that lets users manage in one place a project that involves different types of files.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The mac team cares about making high quality software. Anyone notice that the Mac versions of Microsoft software is usually better than the Windows counterparts?
So it tells you, MS can make good software, they just have to actually care.
They also fixed the CSS bugs on Mac IE. That just shows you...something. They have a fix for this, but they wont release it for windows. Add your consipiracy theory here.
My guess is that the guys at Apple think office:mac is good enough for now and they would rather spend their money replacing shitty software (IE) and working on crazy new things for iLife (like GarageBand). I'm sure eventually appleworks will become a version of oo.org, but its not as big a priority as things that would make people actually switch to the mac. Also, they might be waiting for the OSS community to port oo.org to the aqua interface instead of spending valuable dev time on stuff that will eventually be done anyway.
For the record i use oo.org on a mac and it does a damn good job, imo.
Office for the Mac starting with Office 98 was a very Mac-like suite of applications (Ignoring the crappy version before that). In fact, Microsoft seemed to work hard to make it as Mac-like as possible, which even some other developers were a little lax at.
Office v.X is really good. Excel is a great application, Word a little less so, PowerPoint tolerable. I'd like to see Entourage made a little more Mac OS X technology-friendly-- e.g., give me the option to use the Mac's Address Book within Entourage. But I think they're still doing a good job overall. The fact that Microsoft supported Quartz so quickly is a great sign. Then, after Microsoft dropped the price of Office v.X after sales were a little dismal showed they were responsive to the market. It goes to show you that when Microsoft has to compete, they can do well.
However, Microsoft doesn't always want to compete -- it's easier to dominate than it is to compete. So when Apple introduced the excellent Safari (and with the success of Camino), Microsoft crumbled like a cookie. The problem is, Internet Explorer was really slow and felt kind of crappy. To this day, whenever you launch it, it bugs you about "making it the default application" while ignoring your request to not display the message again. Not surprisingly, Microsoft killed it (and with it, all Mac compatibility with web designers who insist on designing for Internet Explorer). That action showed the side of Microsoft that all Mac users expect is lurking underneath the shiny, Aqua exterior.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
I remember working for a certain networking hardware company that was not cisco and was fiercely competing with Cisco..... However all the site's switches and routing equipment that wasn't used explicitly for testing or development purposes? Cisco......
A *lot* of companies won't eat their own dog food, and that is really funny to me...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
While I generally like Office, Remote Desktop and can tolerate Virtual PC (lack of G5 support is not acceptable) I find the Mac BU decision re: Exchange server quite criminal. Yes, they added support for Exchange server in Entourage, however that support is for Exchange 2000 and only if you leave things alone in a stock install. We have numerous clients that run Exchange sevrer 5.5 and 2000 but turn off all but MAPI support. MS decided to not include any support for the MAPI protocol in Entourage!! They could have just ported Outlook 2001 to the Carbon spec and we'd be pretty well off but they took another route wich in most corporate environments almost lock us out totally in this manner. Thank Apple for including a fairly robust Classic environment so we can still run Outlook 2001 but if you've ever dealt with Classic apps and trying to get something like Outlook 2001 to runs problem-free then you know that we really need an OS X native Exchange client. To add insult to injury they still don't offer MAPI support in the new Office 2004 they recently announced. Just last week I sent feedback to Apple asking them to explore the possibility of them creating an collaboration system like Notes or Exchange on the Mac platform but making sure they use open protocols, 100% equal Mac, Windows and Linux clients, a plug-in system to integrate with Notes and Exchange and practically give it away. Talks about a killer app for Mac OS X Server.
It has little to do with marketing budgets; they advertise in Macintosh magazines- they're regularly the first two pages in Macworld. You wouldn't be asking questions if you saw how much Office for the Mac costs.
That's doubtful.. The OS and Office divisions are the cash cows for Microsoft. There is no way the Mac group is more profitable than the Office group.
Office is the Mac group's only product, and further, I specifically said the OS division is more profitable. Read, kay? Jesus, it was even in the text you quoted from my comment.
Here's a few numbers to wrap your head around. 1)MS Office for PCs? Included with almost every PC for nearly free. 2)Office for Macintosh? $400. What's bigger, 5% of the market at $400/copy, or 95% of the market at "near free"? Hmm?
Why do you think the Macintosh version of Office always comes out first? Why do they sign agreements committing to developing it well into the future? Why do you think it doesn't have any pisses-off-customers product activation? Hmm...maybe because they make a shitload of money off it and want to keep the gravy train rolling?
Please help metamoderate.
Given all the times /.'ers complain about Microsoft doing bloatware, you'd think there would be some thanks for doing a new version that's snappier, up to date, but doesn't go overboard on new features.
I easily spend 1000+ hours a year in Office v.X, and I'm really looking forward to the new version. It's darn complete - there really weren't that many holes, and it looks like they're filling most of them.
My video compression blog
I support a whole campus full of PC and Mac Office users. I disagree that the Mac version is better. My PC users don't complain much about some of the bugs we find in the Mac version. I find that there most common complaint is "unexpectedly quit" issues with office even with all the patches.
I find that Mac users are pretty happy with months of uptime but Windows 2K through XP seem pretty stable with a good patch and antivirus regimen. YMMV. Stability is an issue on any system that doesn't get checkups and patches. Windows is definitely high maintenance in comparison.
Linux is still far from "user-friendly" as a desktop solution. Stable or not, it's still has a huge "geek factor" to bridge before you can just give it to a user without your phone and pager going off every 5 minutes. Talk about high maintenance.
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
As far as I know, .docs created using Office 98 are still translatable to all post version on both platforms. This is a 6 year old app. So, if they stopped tomorrow how long would it be before Mac users REALLY felt the pinch?
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
Microsoft buys virtual PC. Microsoft adopts power IBM PC processor for next Xbox. Word for OSX could be adapted to run on power pc hardware uunder another OS. MS feels mounting pressure of malicious code and is aware of platform monoculture dilemma. Windows for many people just somewhere to run office. If MS wanted to build a new machine with backwards compatibility through virtual PC, running office natively, then all the pieces are falling into place. Get ready for the clone wars
I realize that you didn't make the comment above about Microsoft "secretly using Sun servers", but those are the kind of statements that really make me upset because they are demonstrably false. If you ever had an opportunity to visit the Redmond campus, you would see that.
Microsoft invented the term "dogfood." Eating your own dogfood was slang introduced in the DOS days. Dogfood is software that's not even in BETA yet: in other words, not ready for public consumption. Microsoft is famous for having its people eat their own dogfood. It is not like the networking company you worked at.
Other terms first used at Microsoft? Vaporware. Death March. OOF. See other Microsoft jargon.
How many of you were running 2.3.x or 2.5.x kernels before 2.4.x and 2.6.x came out? It's amazing how people on Slashdot just can't seem to give Microsoft credit.