Mac Mojo

PingBack from http://www.macdunyasi.com/2007/08/02/office-2008-2008e-kaldi/

Kind of a let down, I think Office 2004 is sometimes unbearably slow and seeing this is a major disappointment. Oh well, only a few months to go.

Oh well, as disappointing as it is that the release date has been pushed back, the important thing is to have a quality product with really up-to-date functionality.  Speaking of that, will there be any integration between Office:mac 2008 and PC-only products such as Sharepoint?

Shigeru Miyamoto (creator of Mario and Zelda) once said, "A delayed game is eventually good; a bad game is bad forever."

Please take the time to get it right the first time.  Interested in a beta tester? johnwhalen at yahoo.com.  MS Office user since Mac SE.  Still miss Word 5.1, but like the new ribbon on Windows side.

That was predictable.  Guess the MacBU isn't that much different than the rest of Microsoft, after all.

Are we going to get a beta soon?

Are we going to get details on what's actually in Entourage soon?  Will Entourage be a full-fledged Exchange client?  Can I finally ditch Windows from my Mac?

Can you please build the converters into the Office 2004 suite?

Another great reason to switch to google apps...this may do it for my organization.

Office is MSFT's 2nd largest cash cow, outside of their Windows franchise.  While you're busy creating free file converters and remote access tools, your paying customers are clamoring for Office.  Your priorities are wrong.

I called it this week in my other comments on this site: Microsoft is clearly worried about Apple. In comes Craig to fix the ship, and in his first 90 days he realizes the BU's principal product, supposedly only months from completion, has "quality" issues and, more likely than not, huge gaps in functionality.  I'd be willing to place an enormous bet that there were going to be huge compatibility gaps between Windows and Mac platforms, and Craig saw the disaster coming - and that's at the center of this colossal delay.

The MacBU should be absolutely ashamed.  Yes, you've worked hard, but not smart.  So, while I have these silly free file converters and remote access tools, I'm still using a 4 year old toolset and my Windows buddies are reveling in Office 2007.  I have $300 burning a hole in my pocket to buy your software, and you can't create a product to earn it.

More to the point, rumor has it that Apple is going to announce their Work '08 product next week.  Rather than dealing a death blow to Apple's product and announcing that Office 2008 has gone gold the week before Apple's press conference (which Apple user would buy Work if they can buy Office?), Microsoft announces more delay.  Worse yet, Microsoft doesn't have the savvy to announce delay like Apple did with Leopard (with feature lists and demos), Microsoft just announces delay.  (Oh, they also announced a free set of tools and the 20th anniversary of PowerPoint, where the lead seemed to be pleased with some "Apple only" features.  Read: compatibility issues.)  Meanwhile, Apple will sell oodles of software products this summer/fall/winter instead of watching them collect dust.

Craig - The one thing that should be absolutely crystal clear to you is Office has to be 100% interoperable.  Anything less is a failure in understanding your customers.  You've supposedly "righted" the ship with this delay, now use this time to bridge your products' gaps with customer expectations.  It began a year ago when MacBU announced that it wouldn't support VBA (I cannot tell you how many VBA-based plugins people use w/ Excel).  Who knows what's happened since.  No one is proud enough of the product to announce details yet...

Craig,

that's good to hear we can get a sneak peek soon.  However, ( and i'm sure you are sick of hearing this) I have to say that without VBA it is likely to be very difficult for many users to upgrade to it.

One idea might be to supply a copy of 2004 on the 2008 disks for those who still need VBA.

Can you say a bit more about 2008 - possibly let us see a video or screenshots?

regards,

Peter

You know...   I've been eagerly awaiting the new Office.  I was using Office 2007 before I switched to Mac, and found it to be a wonderful experience...  once I got to Mac I found out what a giant pain in the butt using Office 2004 was.  At least, on an Intel Mac.

This is what I don't get...  every other major developer for Mac managed to create Universal binaries, therefore making the product work much better on intel macs - except you guys.  And what we've been left with is Office 2004 being slow, crashing a lot, and just generally unpleasant to use.

I don't LIKE the alternatives on Mac.  But...  The new semester is starting, and I'm not going to put my eggs in that basket again.  I was really looking forward to Office 2008, and I understand sofftware often takes longer to do.... but what you've left us with really destroys any sense of brand loyalty I had.

As a 20 year Mac manager overseeing 300 corporate users, I'm so not surprised.

I went to Microsoft's Office for Mac roadshow a couple of months ago and I could see at that time they were not all together like Office was good to go.

Typical performance from Microsoft.

No worry, just make the Exchange support really good in Entourage 2008 and I'll let this one slip by. If you are interested in a BETA tester I would be glad to lend a hand also. ;)

Looking forward to the sneak peak this fall. :)

Better good and delayed than crappy and now.  Of course, delayed and crappy is worse than either, so Office 2008 had better be good when it does ship.  It had better.

A disappointing announcement-and I'm sure a tough decision. So, I'll weigh in with a perspective from a loyal Mac user from the late 80's until my workplace switched to PC's in 97...and I finally got sick of maintaining a personal PC at home and 'switched' back to Mac in 2006. Here it is: Like many people, I cannot get access to my workplace Exchange Server for my personal computer (PC or Mac). I think the ability that Entourage has to check Outlook Web Mail and treat it as another Entourage mailbox is incredibly useful to me. The fact that the calendar actually syncs with my work Outlook calendar is key for me. So, my message is: ADD FUNCTIONALITY. I want tasks, and further refined functions. I want access to contacts (even downloading the GAL from Exchange?) I think many users of Office 2004 are comletely unaware of this cool feature of Entourage-I ran into it on the MacBU Blogs, BTW. Make it better-and advertise it. Make me drool for 2008....oh yeah-and since my workplace won't let me have access to the Exchange server, I'll add that my experiences in trying to get work email and calendar functions (which as I said I get in Entourage) synched in any succesful fashion to either a Treo 650 or my newer Blackberry Pearl have been a disappointment. Want to really wow us? Add enhanced features to Entourage for checking OWA and 'forwarding' mail and calendar events to a smartphone...remembering that OWA is the only 'portal' I have into my work Exchange Server. A tall order...but in the meantime, I want to say that the existence and quality of Office 2004 was a key point in my decision to 'switch back' to the Mac. I'll look forward to 2008...especially since you're now gonna use the extra time to give me what I need :-)

We've made the difficult decision to delay Office:Mac 2008. We're targeting Macworld Expo in January

Sorry to hear this .... worth getting it spot on though!

I think the sneak peaks will be welcome .... I must admit that I am not using Office as much as I have done in the past. This is not being clever or irritating, but there will have to be some BIG reasons why I would stop using Keynote and also Neoffice.

I look forward to the progress and release with anticipation!

First of all, I wanted to thank you for all of your hard work.  Someone needed to say it!

However, I think everyone will agree that the MacBU needed a kick, and I'm glad to see that someone has stepped in to do that.

Its quite sad that it took MacBU over three years since we've seen an upgrade to a product.    I'm not just talking about Office.  The RDP client upgrade was promised almost a YEAR ago now, and it could have used one way before that.  Other than minor security tweaks and MSN Messenger "upgrades", Microsoft has actively left itself out of the community.

I won't be purchasing 2008 because of missing VBA integration, but its nice to see the company supporting the Mac platform again.

First off, thank you, Craig, for at least releasing this news tidbit instead bottling up. And I am sure all of the negative comments have been giving you gray hairs. I hate to say it, but I am going to add a couple of gray hairs.

CURRENT PROBLEM: Fix whatever line(s) of code in the current Messenger that cause it to crash every time I close a chat window in it! I know it is caused by Safari 3 Beta being installed, but I am not willing to give up Safari 3, especially when Messenger appears to be the only app affected. If the problem exists now, it will in October for everybody when they upgrade to Leopard. Fix the problem now, and save yourself a hoard of wtf's later.

FUTURE ISSUES: Whereas I did enjoy bragging to my Windows friends when Office 2004 came out that I had Mac-Exclusive features, it turned out to not be so cool in college, because sometimes things just weren't compatible. Compatibility is key, Craig. Trim out the Mac-Exclusive stuff, no matter how much whizz-bang it adds to Office 2008. It just isn't compatible. Instead of wasting time on Mac-Exclusive stuff, focus on feature parity with Windows.

GENERAL MIND-RAMBLING: I can't say I was too impressed by the fact that converters won't be available until after Office even ships, Craig. My school just transitioned every PC on campus to Office 2007 over the summer. You know what that means for productivity on my MacBook? It's screwed!

So, here is my hope for the future of your products (unless your team starts collaborating with the Windows Office guys more). I hope Apple takes your goon of a messaging program and makes it better and builds it into iChat. Also, I hope iWork '08 has the ability to READ and WRITE the new office format. Apple has had plenty of time to reverse engineer that from Office 2007. Something I just don't understand how the same company can't release file format stuff for multiple platforms at the same time. My thought is that the Mac BU just doesn't communicate with the Windows Office team. They wait on the sidelines. A bunch of bench warmers.

Have fun warming pine. I've been using Pages successfully for the last couple semesters, I hope iWork '08 will allow me to do the same.

I'm sorry to hear about the delay. This has been the first version of Office I've been really intrigued by in a while. I appreciate that the floating toolbar UI of v.X and 2004 are being ditched, and I'm one of the few users who probably won't miss VB anyway.

That said, it might serve as an olive branch if some kind of open beta could be implemented for users who are that eager to move off of 2004 (I'm especially thinking of the Intel users). Barring that, releasing say Word 2008 ahead of the rest would perhaps quell some criticism. I know these decisions involve more people than just you, but I'm thinking out loud here ... trying to offer solutions rather than mere criticisms.

I'm glad Craig and team are working hard and taking a critical honest look at where they are. Delays are OK, albeit disappointing. It's just more time for build-up of customer anticipation and expectations. It's not like they'll lose significant sales to iWork or other competition.

What I am ticked about is the statement that they're not going to get converters out for Office 2007 until after release of 2008. That is stupendously LAME. It's just a stinking converter, it shouldn't be that hard for only THE COMPANY THAT WROTE THE FORMAT IN THE FIRST PLACE. You guys have more than a few smart people over there. Write the darn converter already.

To those whining about Office 2004 being lame, etc., I invite you to get a grip on reality. It's a great application suite and more than adequate for the next six months until 2008 comes out. It's not fun using the same dang software for the past four years, but come on, we use it in a big office and it's fine for everyone.

And to address Mike in Alaska's comments, I've had no issues with syncing to an Exchange Server 2003 with a Treo 650, 700p, and 755p, nor any issues syncing with same server using Entourage's Exchange functionality. There's no need for MS to develop weird workarounds to deal with what sounds like a lack of ability on your and/or your IT department's part. If you can access OWA you can access Exchange with Entourage.

OK, Craig, again, good luck. I strangely find this delay encouraging. Bravo. Now get with the converters, please!!!!!

There is now ZERO excuse for an Entourage without actual, native, Exchange support.  Sorry guys, but  the open source community is making you look like fools with NeoOffice and Evolution.  Intel native, VB support, Office 2007 file format support, and Exchange support.

Who ever said free software was poor quality?!  They're handing you your own butt.

this blows big time,

no more ms office for me on mac,

by jan 2008, open office aqua will be out of beta and in the meantime neooffice will do,

countless times have i got caught with ms office 2004 being incompatible with win office,

why the hell can't macbU hire more people to do the job on time?

Office is delayed. Fine. No converters out? Not fine.

All hands should be on those converters first, since the end product won't be here soon enough.

My company has delayed roll-out of Office 2007 until Mac compatibility can be assured, but had planned to update all of our systems starting this fall.  I don't know what the final plans will now change to, but either option is bad.

My recommendation: Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize.  Here are the two top items for me and others in my company:

 * A file conversion tool to bridge the gap between me and outsiders who upgrade.  (Did you really need me to tell you that?)

 * A fully compatible exchange client.

Both of these would be good to have available yesterday.  Perhaps you could sell them alone, making the other office applications available as free downloads?

One more plea for feature/function parity between Entourage and Outlook 2007.

I'm at a large publishing company and one of the people in charge of purchasing decisions has recently started moving our editors off of Macs and onto PC's. The missing functionality in Entourage is her only concrete reason when she's approacehd about it (unless you count herridiculous price comparisons between Mac Pros and Dell Optiplexes). Having this feature/functionality parity would return us to being able to make more rational decisions rather than her winning an argument just because the e-mail client doesn't do half the stuff that the PC version will do.

I went to look at Neo Office, and I found it interesting that on the website was this blurb "Since NeoOffice is developed by volunteers and tested by users, we expect that users will find crashing or other serious bugs. We strongly recommend that you save your work frequently so that if you encounter a crashing bug, you will not lose much data. If you feel that you need software that has been heavily tested, we recommend that you use a commercially-supported product like Microsoft Office or Apple iWork."

Uuuuhhhmmmm hate to seem like I am defending M$, but I don't think I would want to try and support that in a corporate environment. I guess they are saying that just to make sure they have their butts covered, but still, it does not make me feel like it would be very reliable.

For those people who are asking/ begging for things like Viso and Project, your best bet is going to be to run the Windows version through something like VMware.

Also, for the people hoping for a "real" exchange client, I don't think you will ever see one through the MacBU. Entourage currently has support for the things that 90% of Entourage users already do/ need to do. Those things that are missing, or are incomplete, are just not going to be that important to a large majority of the Mac Users who are running Entourage. And my 90% figure is just a wild guess, because I have never seen any Exchange user who used even half of the functionality that is there.

I do consulting for a publisher who has over 100 users, about 25 of those being Mac users. They use Mail, GAL, and personal calendars, and that is all. That is very limited functionality on their part when considering how much exchange costs.

The 2 things that I wish would get fixed in Office 2004. First is the random beach ball in Entourage (I am guessing it is somehow related to the Exchange synchronization, mostly because I have never seen it happen as often as it does on Entourage clients that are connected to an exchange server. And second, in both Entourage and Word, the fairly frequent lock up while typing, only to come back to life life and finally show the text on screen that you had been typing when the application decided to have a fit of ADD.

And please tell me why... why MSN messenger, and not just go with Addium?

Microsoft’s new Macintosh Business Unit (MacBU) General Manager, Craig Eisler, announced this morning that Microsoft Office 2008, originally scheduled for release in the second half of 2007, won’t be available until January 2008....

Craig,

I hope you are the man to take the MacBU from an all time low to the top. I hope this delay is because you set the bar much higher than previously.

Here's some advice:

1. We need a good surprise from you guys and we need it soon; the Mac community is loosing faith  in you - something as unthinkable as an early release, VBA support or a new product.

2. Hire more people to get the job done.

3. Stop making "Mac-only features" until Office has ALL the functionality of its PC counterpart. What do we care if there is a Mac-only Publishing Layout View if Office does not support VBA?

4. Make Office a PRO application - not an iWork-inspired, down-trimmed, bubbly-looking, light version of Office 2007. If you want style inspiration, get it from Adobe CS3: feature-rich, streamlined and consistent.

Ah, Word 5.1.  The last version of Word that was really worth a damn. Don't even get me started on Word 6.0!

I'm now coming up on six months working in an academic / publishing environment without Office.  Neo Office, particularly since Patch 5, is a more than viable alternative for 90% of Office users.  In the past month I've moved a dozen friends & family away from non-Intel Office to the open source suite.

Keynote alone is worth abandoning Office. PowerPoint?  A distant memory.

Goodbye, Microsoft. My hard drive has never been happier.

"Better late than never."

Office O8 is the only major piece of software that is not Intel-Mac compatible.  

We appreciate your efforts, Craig. We all recognize that your company is not good a releasing new software.  Look at Vista.  A few months late on Office '08 is better than the delay in getting Vista out.

You will probably set a record by being a few months close to your original target.

The big test is whether you guys (MBU) are going to allow Entourage to import data from Outlook.

This time around, please act like a company that wants to develop products that meet your customers needs.

Obviously this is disappointing--I just bought a MBP in anticipation of 08 coming in 2 months--but now its more like 6.

Honestly, 2004 is fine from a feature perspective, but I am finding that Rosetta does have its share of issues.  I am a heavy, heavy user of Excel and PowerPoint, and each has its own quirks under emulation.

Excel crashes often enough that I am saving documents every 2 minutes (I get about 3 crashes a day when I'm cranking).  PowerPoint seems more stable, but constantly leaves artifacts behind from moving objects around the screen (is this a Santa Rosa driver issue?)  And even on the 2.2 C2D, performance across the suite is only adequate and not really snappy.

The reality is that 2004 is workable (but far from ideal) for the time being and when it is not, I have a 2003 install in my Boot Camp/Fusion setup.  Unfortunately, the lack of VB and Access will require me to hang onto the PC version of the suite for a while.

MacBU GM Craig Eisler posted a new release date on the MacMojo blog. Office 2008 for Mac will be available in the US in mid-January 2008 (planning for Macworld) and global general availability will occur in the first quarter of 2008....

Well, I was trying to hold off on buying iWorks but this cinches it.  I start a graduate program in a few weeks and I'm not gonna hold out until January for something better than Office 2004.  You just lost whatever the Student/Teacher price was.  Good job.

This is disappointing, but not entirely unexpected, considering the state of the beta.

Please please please make it fully consistent with the Windows versions - full functionality as a real Exchange client for Entourage, full compatibility with Word and PP for Win.

Anything else is going to shoo your customers out the door to iWork and Open Office so fast you'll feel the wind all the way to the MacBU offices.

The bit about the converters being even later is, well, a real kick in the pants.  Lovely docx and its siblings are becoming more of a headache with each passing day.  Tacking on another 6-8 months of increasing pain provides confirmation of the wisdom of my decision to install NeoOffice on every machine I build now.  Don't be surprised if users like it and decide to stay.

The only way to be sure they will return when 2008 hits is to make your product an *error-free* companion to Office 2007.  **EVERYTHING** must work just as though it was the Win version, or it won't be worth a damn, regardless of the quantity of hard work your team puts into it.

Finally, for the love of God, get a bigger staff!!!  I'm sure you're aware of this problem, so consider this one more voice in the chorus that you can take to your managers.  MacBU doesn't have the hands to get the job done the way it needs to be done (on time and complete).  A manager's first responsibility is to get the team the resources it needs.  In this case, that means more skilled coders.

Good luck in keeping this new time line!

One schedule slip will likely beget others given Microsoft's track record with Vista.  With an Intel Mac, I have waited patiently more than a year for a Universal binary version of Office.  My patience has now run out and I will be purchasing Apple iWork '08 with my California/Microsoft Antitrust Settlement check.  Rumor has it that Apple will have a basic Excel app in its new suite.  If not, the NeoOffice or OpenOffice equivalent will suffice.  Considering the pervasiveness of Microsoft's malaise, Apple's '08 suite will likely be more compatible with Office '03 and '07 than Microsoft Office 2008 for the Mac.  This company is definitely not the same Microsoft that vanquished Lotus two decades ago.  Of course, with no prospect of becoming a new "Microsoft Millionaire," the employee morale and motivation is not what it once was either.

Perhaps it would be a good idea to use the 4-5 month extension that you now have, and hire on a "few" (read:lots) extra developers to start working on VBA - even if you supplied a VBA "add-on" mid-2008, it would eventually allow VBA-dependent Excel users upgrade to Office 2008 at SOME point!

Office 2008 Coming January 2008 blog post from Mac Mojo has the details.

I just switched fffrom PC to Mac and am frustrated with two things in Entourage:

1. Can't read old Outlook messages saved with msg file extension

2. url addresses in body of enoturage message are not clikcable.

I am, sadly, going back to PC because of this

Maybe that's Microsoft's intention?  . .  . .

"Office O8 is the only major piece of software that is not Intel-Mac compatible."

Actually, Intuit has yet to release a UB of Quicken, or even announce an intent to do so.

The MacBU is not perfect, but I agree with the above post.

Intuit is a far flagrant violator of "The PC version is better and the Mac version can suck it" behavior.

Office 2008 needs to be fully compatible with Office 2007 for Windows, and it probably will be.  How could the MacBU (or even Microsoft)possibly explain how this new file format for Office 2007 is supposed to be a "standard" when it doesn't even work between the Windows and Mac versions?

VBA support...everyone is clamoring for it, I've never used it...but if it's that important than I agree with the person who suggested it be a free download as an add-on even a year from now if that is what it takes Microsoft to re-add VBA support to Office 2008.

Some of the above have suggested that you could supply a VBA "add-on" mid-2008, as it  allow VBA-dependent Excel users upgrade to Office 2008 eventualy.  That is an excelent idea.

Can you possibly indicate on this blog whether that is a possibility?

Is it possible to be on of the beta testers for the Office 2008 product?

Well what can I say, I am a bit disappointed, I did wait it and I also Borrow the money from my friend and then boom, nothing, but I still can wait to try it, who know maybe this delay is good for someone (and maybe for me)

Some of the comments, blah, typical Apple FanBoy Microsoft hating - but realize they can't do without Office - noise.

Apple completely changes to x86ers, doesn't tell anyone until the last minute while they get a head start on their own programs, than Apple's fans wonder why everyone else is so slow to get products out the door.

If you need Office so bad just use Boot Camp or visualization.  Or get a PC.

I am switching to iWork and aim

Hasn't it occured to anyone that Microsoft is DELIBERATELY shafting the MacBU?

With the Mac's growing market share, maaaaybe MS feels a little threatened about long-term implications. Denyin