Microsoft Makes Five-Year Commitment to Office on the Mac
TMO at Macworld - Microsoft Makes Five-Year Commitment to Office on the Mac
by , 2:50 PM EST, January 10th, 2006
SAN FRANCISCO -- As mentioned during Apple CEO Steve Jobs' Macworld keynote, Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit (MBU) formally announced Tuesday morning a new five-year commitment to deliver new versions of Office for Intel- and PowerPC-based Macs. The MBU plans to deliver improvements to Entourage 2004 and Messenger for Mac in March and will build converters that read Microsoft's new Office Open XML file formats.
Scheduled enhancements to Entourage 2004 include syncing Entourage calendars, address books, notes and tasks with handheld devices that support Sync Services. In addition, support for Spotlight searches in Mac OS X v10.4 "Tiger" will be added, and the MBU will enhance Smart Card technology for users who require digitally signed and encrypted e-mail.
Messenger for Mac 5.1 will enable secure file transfer with users outside a firewall, and it will offer an improved ability to figure out where a user is located if they are logged into Microsoft Office Live Communications Server at more than one computer. In addition, IT managers will have more options for saving IM chats at an organizational level.
Finally, the MBU's converters for reading Microsoft's new Office Open XML file format will be released after the next version of Office for Windows (Office 12) comes out. Office 12 is scheduled for release late in 2006, approximately the same time Windows Vista is expected to be released.
Observer Comments
Tue Jan 10, 2006 4:06 pm Subject: Why no numbers
Tue Jan 10, 2006 4:15 pm Subject: Not what I heard...
QuoteThis may explain why there is no spreadsheet in iWork.
Actually, the story I heard was that there wasn't enough room on the CD. So the offshore contractor who wrote iWeb and the offshore contractor who wrote Numbers were told to fight it out. Turns out that the contractor who wrote iWeb had access to missiles (he claims to be a distant cousin of Saddam and has a vacation condo in Damascus). So the contractor who wrote Numbers decided to forego the US$200 bonus and work on an improved compression app for next year.
Tue Jan 10, 2006 5:03 pm Subject: You may be right
I wonder why they didn't use a DVD, they would have had room for plenty of room for Numbers and the other items. I was thinking that Office is important to Mac sales and Steve was playing politics with the Man of the Year.
QuoteBosco wrote:QuoteThis may explain why there is no spreadsheet in iWork.
Actually, the story I heard was that there wasn't enough room on the CD. So the offshore contractor who wrote iWeb and the offshore contractor who wrote Numbers were told to fight it out. Turns out that the contractor who wrote iWeb had access to missiles (he claims to be a distant cousin of Saddam and has a vacation condo in Damascus). So the contractor who wrote Numbers decided to forego the US$200 bonus and work on an improved compression app for next year.
Spreadsheets are overrated. Ninety percent of Excel users just use it like a two-dimensional array (a simple database). A few "advanced" users make sums and averages and such for groups of cells. Power users who actually build business applications in Excel are pretty rare. So, I think it's more that there's not a market for it.
What Apple really need do is release Data, a simple-to-use database application that is import/export compatible with Microsoft Access. When I try to convince business users to go Mac, that's the one app I always have to admit there isn't an equivalent to. Yes, I know there are databases for the Mac. What I mean is there is no drag-and-drop, push some buttons and get a report, kind of application for the Mac. Is there?
Tue Jan 10, 2006 11:58 pm Subject: They didn't use a DVD because...
QuoteI wonder why they didn't use a DVD, they would have had room for plenty of room for Numbers and the other items. I was thinking that Office is important to Mac sales and Steve was playing politics with the Man of the Year.
Truth be told (and this is really inside dirt I'm sharing, so don't repeat it or say where you heard it), the offshore contractor who wrote Numbers was dislexic and generally bad at math. While the spreadsheets are beautiful the way only Apple software can be, some of the functions didn't work too well. One sample document showed the cost breakdown of the new Intel iMac. While the component prices seem to total thousands of dollars, the SUM(A1...A28) function adds up to $999, yielding a 30% profit margin when priced at $1299. This problem would probably send any company that doesn't make iPods into financial oblivion. So Steve made up the story about not having any room on the CD to see if he could get the contractor who wrote Numbers to quietly go get an outsourced phone support job from Dell.
iWeb is in iLife, not iWork.
Saw a link that should help importing Access data to FileMaker:
http://www.actualtechnologies.com/product_access.php
Actually, I wanted to see Numbers and FileMaker Express in iWork 06. I have to use formulas for some spreadsheets and am stuck with Excel for now. Agghhh!
Maybe MWSF 07 . . .
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