Webthoughts

Yesterday, the Mac BU at Microsoft started publishing some new information about Office:mac 2008 (due for release in January, apparently). They've put up a new website dedicated to information about the product, and the Mac Mojo blogs (along with individual employee blogs) have started revealing some info.

Early looks at Office have provided some interesting tidbits. It definitely looks as though the Mac BU really is interested in making Office more user-friendly and Mac-like. The new page-layout view seems to make it much easier to design complex layouts in Word. Of course, it remains to be seen how well this actually works when the product is actually in users hands versus just looking at marketing videos.

But, a few things are bugging me. I should probably note that I'm not an Office hater. I own Office:mac 2004. I've owned ever version of Office for the Mac since Office 98. I use Office frequently for many different things, although, to be honest, the application I use the most from Office is Entourage (with Word a distant second and Excel and PowerPoint even more distant thirds). I mostly like Office for the Mac and want to see the product succeed.

Here are a few of my thoughts:

• I find it interesting that, in all information we've seen so far since Office 2008 was introduced at MacWorld (which, to be fair, hasn't been much yet), there has been little information about the new version of Entourage. As I indicated above, I use Entourage the most of any of the Office applications. It is always running in my dock.

  Why the dearth of information about Entourage? The only thing I can think of is that either Entourage 2008 will not be that big an evolution of the current version and won't get a lot of the new whiz-bang features Microsoft is currently trumpeting (like the Elements Gallery and such), or the new Entourage will be such a huge leap that they're carefully keeping it under wraps until they get the "lesser" stuff out the way first.

  I'm figuring the reason we're not seeing too much is more the first guess than the second. Really, what would Entourage need with an Elements Gallery?

  By the way, before anyone asks, I don't see My Day being that big a leap. That really is just a natural evolution of the idea behind Entourage.

• Besides the fact that Visual Basic for Applications will no longer be included in the Mac version of Office (which already has set off some harsh criticisms of Microsoft), what we've seen of Office 2008 so far shows that the Mac Office is diverging from the Windows version of Office even more than ever before.

  Let's look at Office:mac 2004 for a moment. Although Office 2004 was definitely the most Mac-like version of Office to date and even included some Mac-only "innovations" like the formatting palette, a Windows Office user could sit down in front of a Mac and feel mostly comfortable. The toolbars mostly looked the same, with the same options in the same places. The menus were mostly the same (with a few minor variations). The dialog boxes were mostly the same. The point was that the Mac version of Office was going to be mostly consistent with the Windows version of Office, with a couple of exceptions to help the software feel more Mac-like.

  But, now we have Office:mac 2008 and Office 2007 for Windows. Suddenly, consistency is no longer an issue. Office 2007 for Windows has the Ribbon. Office:mac 2008 does not. It has the Elements Gallery, but that seems to serve an entirely different function than the Ribbon. Office:mac 2008 still has toolbars, but they now look like standard Mac OS X toolbars and look very little like the toolbars found in versions of Office for Windows prior to 2007.

  Office:mac 2008 does look more like a Mac application. I'll have to wait until I actually use it to see if it feels and actsmore like a Mac app, but I'm willing to bet it does. Personally, I think this is a great thing. I want to use good-looking, Mac-like applications. I do not like the clunky feel of Office for Windows, especially with that horrid Ribbon.

  BUT...

  With the two products diverging even more, how is this going to affect the perception of the Mac in mixed-platform shops or even to the common consumer? Let's face it, like it or not, the Mac needs Office. If Office:mac went away, the Mac would become more irrelevant (note that I'm not saying that it's irrelevant now—far from it). Someone may decide not to switch to a Mac because he or she couldn't get Office. A business may decide to standardize on Windows rather than be mixed-platform because Office was not available for the Mac.

  Unfortunately, that's the computing world we live in. Office is still that important.

  But now, we have two software suites using the same basic name, but look and perhaps act very differently based on the platform they are on. Something that works one way on Windows may work completely differently on the Mac. Word 2007 on Windows does not look like Word 2008 on the Mac. It is becoming harder, it seems, to apply knowledge of the software on platform to the same software on the other platform.

  Is it possible that this could cause a similar reaction as if Office for the Mac disappeared altogether?

  Granted, the new version of Office:mac may be heralded as Microsoft finally "getting the Mac"? Mac users may finally begin to say that perhaps Office is a good thing.

  But, what does that matter if a business says that the versions are too different and they don't want to take the time and expense to train employees on two different versions of Office for two platforms. Therefore, they decide they are going to standardize their entire fleet on one platform. Which platform do you think they'll standardize on?

  Or, what if Joe Consumer is in an Apple Store, contemplating the purchase of his first Mac? He walks up to a display iMac and sees that it has Microsoft Office on him to try out. He launches Word and is quickly confused because it doesn't look or act like Word 2007 (or 2003 for that matter) on the computer he has now. Obviously, that means that Macs are difficult to use and they don't do things the "right way". Therefore, he decides he's not going to buy a Mac.

  Those examples are probably a little contrived and very probably a little stereotypical. It's also entirely possible that I'm completely off base. It's not as if I've actually used the software. I'm just going off of the previews I've seen from Microsoft. I should also probably add that I don't want Office:mac to just be simple clone of Office for Windows. As I said, I hate the ribbon! Plus, I want my software to be Mac-like, not Windows-like.

  But, I do think this is something to think about.

• I also think it's interesting that the new promotional website is entirely Flash based. Say what you will about the appropriateness of using Flash for this type of website—that is neither here nor there. What I find interesting is that Microsoft, when they decided to make this website heavily media-based, decided to use Flash and not their own Silverlight technology.

  Make no mistake: this website was not put together by the Mac BU. That group has their hands full getting the new version of Office ready. They don't have time to muck around with websites.

  No. Instead, some marketing group at Microsoft put this site together. And they used Flash. Not Silverlight.

  It is true that Silverlight is still a very new technology and probably hasn't really propagated all that far just yet. There probably just isn't a huge installed base yet, especially on the Mac. But, that brings up another interesting point. Does this mean that possibly someone at Microsoft was actually taking the target market into mind and decided to do what was right for that market instead of just imposing the "Microsoft Way"? Silverlight probably doesn't have a huge installed base, especially on the Mac platform. Therefore, Silverlight is not an appropriate technology for this website. Since we want to be media rich, we'll go with a technology that has a near 100% installed base on the target platform (Flash) even though it is a direct competitor.

  An interesting thought.
  

Those are just a few ideas that started rattling around in my head as I browsed some of the new info on Office:mac 2008. I should say that I am looking forward to actually trying the new software.