BusinessWeek: Mac Office 2004 Could Persuade IT Managers To Reconsider Mac

May 31st, 2004 at 3:00 PM - News by Bryan Chaffin

BusinessWeek has published a review of Microsoftis new Mac office suite, Office 2004. The reviewer, Stephen H. Wildstrom, says that the newest version of Office for Mac is a good enough corporate citizen that it could "persuade some corporate technology managers to take a fresh look at Apple." From the review:

Bill Gates used to brag that Microsoft made more money from each Macintosh sold than Apple Computer did. Appleis hardware is now plenty profitable, but Microsoft software remains an important part of the Mac ecosystem. Microsoftis latest effort for the Mac, Office 2004, could even persuade some corporate technology managers to take a fresh look at Apple.

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FOR CORPORATE MAC USERS, the most important feature of the new Office is Entourage, the e-mail, contact, and calendar program. Entourage 2004 brings nearly all the features of Microsoftis Exchange enterprise mail and scheduling service to the Mac. It will only work with recent versions of Exchange server with Web access enabled, and it fetches mail more slowly than Outlook on Windows. But Entourage supports the collaborative scheduling that is a mainstay in most offices that use Exchange. Finally having the functional equivalent of Outlook makes Macs running the OS X operating system better corporate citizens.

Mr. Wildstrom also calls Mac OS X the best OS on the market today, with some caveats for those dependent on Windows-software. Thereis more in the full article, which we recommend as an interesting read.