theReformed

Sorry, no dice this round. After almost three-quarters of a year waiting, beyond the first and second quarters of 2007, the Office built for OS X will not be available until late into the year (December approximately) for Release to Manufacturer and wouldn't (legally) be seen by consumers on shelves until sometime in the first quarter of 2008. The announcement came earlier today on the Microsoft Mac Development Unit's MSDN blog "Mac Mojo" ( http://blogs.msdn.com/macmojo ). As a hardcore Microsoft product end-user, it irks me to have to concede that Microsoft is failing it's buyers.

However, this author isn't surprised, as Microsoft has been reeling back in it's intended roll-outs on several products in the recent past, including it's flagship operating system, Windows Vista (codenamed Longhorn initially). This event has incited discouragement in the Macintosh community that actually cares and isn't currently sporting OpenOffice ( http://www.openoffice.org ) software already - or even the new Apple iWork.

One perspective being generated on the Internet is that Microsoft didn't see the marketable audience response that it was hoping, which would of course lead them to extend their release timeframe to further saturate their intended market with advertising and persuasion to purchase the product. Macintosh users in general may be confused or frustrated with the idea of buying into another Microsoft product of the same line, when their last product, Office 2004 for Mac, flopped in maintenance, updates or failed to initiate new releases/versions of the software to keep up with it's PC counterpart. The PC version however has seen exceptional expansion on featuresets and dynamic libraries that have not only sped up it's software base, but made it more amiable to more universal technologies like XML.

"CraigE", the author of the post on their blog ( http://blogs.msdn.com/macmojo/archive/2007/08/02/office-2008-coming-january-2008.aspx ), made a vague excuse for their slip under the auspices of the "right quality level" for their product release and went on to say that it is "super important" to the team at Microsoft and praised their "long standing commitment to the Mac platform"…, huh? What long-standing commitment would you be speaking of Craig? Microsoft left Mac users high and dry going on half a decade ago - do you really believe that a BETA release of the RDC application is really living up to that fallacy of a claim; are there that many Mac users hard up for a means to interact with a Windows XP machine at the desktop level (when you just as easily could have made RDC's protocol open to the already inherent VNC utility build into OS X)? Of course that would have cut into Microsoft's bottom-line in licensing right and we can't have that.

Apple users giving feedback, have expressed they felt afraid to buy into a product that will seemingly lose support over the course of the next 5 years or won't see a succession in release within the next decade if developed at all, as it's predecessor has. It seems likely that at the time, Microsoft still saw Apple as the red-headed stepchild less than a decade ago; now the tables are turning on Microsoft, their market dominance is being encroached upon from other, cheaper software and hardware upstarts and they might just need Apple to help bail them out as their Macintosh userbase grows much larger over the next three years while their machines become more affordable.

How much more ambiguous will Microsoft's projections or statements become over the course of this decade? Just give us the truth without all the saturated fat.