“Is Microsoft running out of ideas? Is it so desperate to keep the cash cow’s udders full that it’s resorted to simply reshuffling the Office bits every few years and calling it a new release? Based on my experiences with this and earlier builds of version 2010, I’m inclined to answer yes,” Kennedy reports.
Kennedy reports, “The idea well has finally run dry in Redmond. Maybe they can borrow a cup or two from their contemporaries down in Cupertino.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Microsoft’s done quite enough stealing from Apple already, thanks.
BTW, these are the people who want you to pay them way too much for their bloated, disorganized mess:
• Not everyone wants a machine that’s been washed with unicorn tears. – David Webster, Microsoft’s general manager for brand marketing, commenting on Mac users, April 4, 2009.
• Paying an extra $500 for a computer… $500 more to get a logo on it? – Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, insinuating that the only difference between a Mac and a Windows PC is the Apple logo – March 20, 2009
While the “You’re a Fscking Idiot, Now Buy My Software” is an interesting sales tactic, its efficacy may be suspect.
We have long been 100% Microsoft-free and shall remain so ad infinitum. Do you really need Microsoft Office? Give Apple’s free 30-day iWork ’09 trial a try and find out for yourself.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dev” for the heads up.]
MS, here’s an idea…
Make it work. So many things is Office, particularly Word, don’t work as expected/properly.
– styles
– auto numbering
– auto formatting
and that’s just the top 3 that bug me.
Also, I’d like to be able to turn all that auto stuff off and have it stay off without having to search in 15 places to disable the same options.
Just waiting for an “entourage” to be added to iWork, only MS app I use!
And I have tried using iMail, iCal, they just don’t do it for my use 🙁
The IT guys let me make a new “This Refrigerator Will Be Cleaned Out Every Friday–NO EXCEPTIONS!” sign for the fridge in the breakroom on the PowerPoint beta. The screen bean is still there which is awesome. What isn’t awesome is Nancy in procurement brings in her cabbage soup once a week. It smells and the container leaks. Thing is Nancy’s cat died a month ago and noboby wants to upset her further by telling her to keep the cabbage soup at home. I bet she uses a MAC too.
Your potential. Our passion.™
Microsoft Free for over a year now…
I said the same thing about Office 2007. It had almost nothing new feature. Basically they added the horrid ribbon and called it a day. Microsoft hasn’t had an original idea in years!
@ Comment from: Zune Tang®
Lol nice twitter page mate very pink!!!!! have you got matching earings to go with you pink handbag and Zune?
Same for Adobe. How about instead of a bunch of new wizz bang features, clean up what you have now. Make it all work better?
Slow bloated sloppy code withoutmuch polish, crash ridden garbage with 40 new ‘features’ none related to increased stability and improved performance.
The software industry needs a Snow Leapard type update.
Sorry, meant to say feature wise…
I dumped Word for LaTeX (which is free! and runs on anything, even Windoze) 15 years ago. TeX Live 2009 was just released and works so nicely. Little things like ligatures are automatic — try getting one in Word.
Just how can M$ justify that 75%+ profit margin on Office? And why in the world does anyone buy into that? It continually boggles the mind…
I use all the iWork & iLife stuff. On occasion, NeoOffice to handle the POS Windows files that are full of it.
Office has always been clunky an unintuitive. Sure, people have gotten used to it through years and years of being subjected to it. But it sucks even if it has powerful features. The thing could have gotten rewritten in a much better way. How come I can do what I need in iWorks with out looking at a manual or help file of Goggling etc.
We just switched to office 2007 at work, talk about lame, I have to learn the thing all over again.
Like Microsoft Word is designed to prevent you doing anything remotely easily. Only the instruction manual is bigger, fatter and less comprehensible.
Here’s the problem: Raise your hand if you are a sought-after engineer, programmer, or designer today who would love to spend your days creating an office program…
It pains me to say this. But, I think the promotion of iWorks on a daily basis by Mac Daily News does a disservice to a lot of folks who may go out and buy a copy in hopes it will exceed MS Office. For some, maybe it will. But, the reviews on this site and others would not lead one to believe it. Personally, if you are in business, I do not see an escape route from MS Office. Some programs, like NeoOffice, come close. But, nothing really compares 100% with Excel and Word. I say that after extensively using NeoOffice for at least a year. I find that documents sent to me by folks who use Office on both Windows and Mac platforms are not formatted properly in 100% of the cases. Outlining is off slightly, formatting in Headers and Footers is off slightly. Sure, I can fix most of them. But, outline numbering in NeoOffice is simply not up to par and fixing the formatting is not a simple task. When I open the document in question in Word, the formatting issues are either easy to fix or they do not exist. If you dabble in spreadsheets on occasion and do not have a need to send files to others on the Windows platform (90% of the world), NeoOffice is great and it’s free. But, it is not 100% compatible with MS Office and the nuances will become apparent after you start using it. The one glaring area that may affect some people is in macro handling. But, I do not use macros. So, this has not been an issue for me. I am not even sure where the status of the macro issues is at this moment. I am sure I will get an earful abotuo it. But, it is not a factor for me.
iWorks is not even in the same ballpark as Excel. Nearly every spreadsheet I open In iWorks that was done in NeoOffice or Excel — no matter how simple — result in errors. Sure, the files open. But, formulas are converted to fixed numbers when there is an error. If I only used iWorks and lived in a vacuum where everyone else I knew used iWorks, life would be great. I like the product look and feel. But, compatibility…not even close.
I have also tried Mariner Calc…not ready for prime time. Takes f-o-r-e-v-e-r- to open files and is not 100% compatibiel. Open Office…NeoOffice is the same thing only better from a Mac perspective.
So, until NeoOffice operates at 100% or there is something else that pops up, I do not see Office going away. It’s all about compatibility and nothing else compares 100% with MS Office.
FYI, I have been a Mac user since 1984 and personally own a 2008 iMac and MBP. I do not own a PC and never will. So, I am not a shill for MS. Far from it.
I agree with the overall sentiment and I would stop using all of their software, but for large, complicated, linked spreadsheets Numbers can’t keep up. The speed on an 8 core MacPro with tons of memory, HD, etc. comes to a crawl in Numbers. And no, I do not want to break up the workbook. Turbocharge Numbers and I’m there.
@mac-daddio. Great statement nothing is compatible with M$ Office. Not even M$ Office is compatible. The number of times I received a doc, xls or ppt that looked different on my system than on the sender system, it’s amazing.
I’ll stay with Framemaker for documents. Shame Adobe stopped Mac support for this one.
Your post illustrates what the matter is, with regard to Micosoft’s inability to write useful software, that only gets better with time.
You, and millions like you are stuck with Office, because it is the de facto standard, even though every iteration brings a whole new set of problems.
I’m willing to wager that if Microsoft were to scale back on Word, in order to produce a basic word processor for home consumers, it would prove to be a popular app, even among enterprise, but unfortunately we know that is not their target market.
Their last attempt to appeal to consumers resulted in Microsoft Bob.
> Do you really need Microsoft Office? Give Apple’s free 30-day iWork ’09 trial a try and find out for yourself.
Unfortunately for the readers of the linked article, since it’s about Office for Windows, they’ll have to Get a Mac first, then “Give Apple’s free 30-day iWork ’09 trial a try.”
I have the great displeasure of having to use office 2007 at work and I cannot believe how unintuitive and difficult it is to do ANYTHING in Excel or Access. The ribbon menu system is a disaster. I don’t know who EVER thought this was a good interface.
The only thing that keeps MS Office going is that has become a de-facto standard in the business world where compatibility is paramount. It’s not about ease of use or efficiency, but about everyone running the same software, so we all have the same features (and faults) to make it easier to train and to support.
re “Do you really need Microsoft Office?”
Pages is a superior document generator for most tasks, but as I found out even the smallest formatting difference can have disastrous results when someone tries to view that document in any version of Office or vice versa. Sadly, even running Office on Windows via Parallels created issues with file corruption when they were saved to the Mac desktop and emailed vial Apple’s Mail.app (no techs could figure out why). For that reason we had to standardize our office on the most prevalent version of MS Office *on Windows PCs only* even though we’d prefer to use Pages on Macs.
Personally, I think MS “shuffles the deck” every couple of years partially to make the sure the competition remains incompatible with Office and can’t become a fully competent replacement. As soon as they begin to catch up to all the little idiosyncrasies, MS changes the game again to guarantee their captive audience.
ZT nice story. I feel your pain!
Unfortunately, Office is not optional when .docx and Excel and PP files are being passed around, are the ‘standard’ at work. Because of docx, I tried Office 2008 and it was incapable (of cut/paste support of 3rd party embedded objects, etc.), sluggish and a penny-dreadful HI as only MS knows how. So it’s Orifice 2004 for now, which at least is snappy (in fact, snappier than iWork’09).
Jafo, I hear you. But, I have not had a single document from MS Office that I can ever remember…certainly not within the past 5 years…that did not operate correctly from within MS Office on my Mac. I have to say that my statement is a very positive one. Because, if I had not been able to open a MSO doc on my Mac, it would have been extremely embarrassing given my vocal support in my work environement for the Mac.
I have heard the “bloated” statement made numerous times on Mac forums. I am not a programmer. But, I do not find MS Office to be bloated. Feature laden…yes. Opens fast enough and runs smoothly. I seldom have a problem with it. Look at the feature set for Excel alone. It can handle 1,048,576 rows by 16,384 columns. That’s over 17 Billion cells!! Does anything on the market even come close? I could not find the number of functions Excel has. But, Numbers has a paltry 250. That is why you get an error almost every time you open a spreadsheet that did not originate in Numbers.
Here’s my perspective. If MS had iWorks or NeoOffice and Mac had Office, this site would constantly throw it in MS’s face. The problem is: I want something BETTER than Office, NeoOffice, iWorks and Mariner Calc. Then I would be able to dump MSO. I barely use NeoOffice. But, I contributed to the development with hard cash. Where is Apple’s contribution? If they do not want to make a serious effort at providing a significantly better app than MS Office, contribute a few million to the Open Office community. Give them the task to make a 100% compatible product that provides a full-Mac feature set. Without MS Office, the Mac would be screwed. With a superior product to MS Office…a fantastic, 64 bit, eye-candy laden, feature laden, blow the doors off, easier to use, intuitive, completely compatible plus 10 times better app…then we as consumers would have something and it might even entice Corporate America to make the switch. It is the everyday, boring, work-required apps that drive computer sales. Bring a little excitement to the humdrum work world…then you have something.