Microsoft says "fuck it, we're going Mac"

[OcellotJenkins]

From: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2005/sep05/09-13OfficeUI.mspx

New Office UI:

[Mesozoic]

Are you suggesting that copying the Mac represents some new MS tendency?

[OcellotJenkins]

Are you suggesting that copying the Mac represents some new MS tendency?

No, they are just making absolutely no attempt to hide it anymore.

Edit:  More screenshots

[Surlyboi]

Balmer to the MS developers: "That screen's not lickable yet!"

[schild]

Balmer to the MS developers: "That screen's not lickable yet!"

The snozberries taste like snozberries?

[Surlyboi]

Balmer to the MS developers: "That screen's not lickable yet!"

The snozberries taste like snozberries?

They're Excellicious!

[Lum]

Ironically, I've been using Office 2004 Mac for the past week or so and it's been quite a pleasant experience. Part of it is that the Mac display is better so there's less eyestrain, but the layout of Word is nicer too (floating windows for styles and whatnot, mainly). Only thing that's been a pain is learning to cmd-click instead of right click. You can get two-button mice to fix, but I'm using a laptop so that's not horribly likely.

The Mac version is much less cluttered than the version posted above, too. That actually looks like it's running under Vista, though. Hope you have 2gigs of RAM!

Windows Vista/Office 12:


Mac OSX/Office 2004:



And before the peanut gallery pipes up, I *know* I can't run any games on the Mac. Given my ADD that's actually a GOOD thing. I bought it as a nifty word processor/email client and it handles that job spiffily.

[Surlyboi]

So, the machine of Lum the Mad is a Mac...

eenteresting.

That said, most of my postage is done from my powerbook, so I've got your back, man. And I do agree that my Office 2004 experience is better than my Office XP or 2003 experiences on the PC. If for no other reason than the glaring lack of Outhouse.

[Lum]

I don't use Entourage (the Mac version of Outlook) either. The included Mail app seems to have better spam blocking (built in Bayesian filtering ftw)

[Cheddar]

How does that Mac version compare to Office 2003 for Windows?  I  Office 2k3... its is pure love.



I love you Lum.  Manbabies? 

[Lum]

No manbabies, please.

Uh, it's about the same featurewise, as far as I can tell. There's some Mac-style UI improvements (the floating windows I mentioned earlier, font styles/names show up as their actual font in menus, etc) and a new "notebook mode" for note-taking (what's in the screenshot), but overall it just works. I've been doing final revision edits on my book this past week and it's been handling winword 2003 templates and files fine.

[Surlyboi]

Like Lum said, Office 2k4 is on par with 2k3, the biggest exceptions being that it follows Mac conventions rather than PC conventions, so it seems, to me anyway, less cluttered and intrusive. I will say that the little glowing toolbox that tells me my documents may not be compatible with anything older than Office XP is annoying in an existential angsty way, but other than that, it just annoys me slightly less.

[HaemishM]

While I can't argue with the Mac's ease of use, I'm so goddamn sick of the shiny glass button look that has permeated the graphic design ethos since the release of the fruity Imacs.

[Pococurante]

So I guess this means we're all about to learn the joys of one-button mice... ;)

[Surlyboi]

Nah, one button mice are so last month  :-D

[Pococurante]

There can be only one true Mightymouse!




Though there is room in the world for runner-ups:

[Sky]

OSX pwns. Microsoft has a good team working in their mac division, Office is great on the Mac. With the lackluster pc gaming offerings (imo) this year, I'm probably going to skip my next pc upgrade and save for a powerbook, mostly for pro tools. I'm pretty much a mac convert.

We are a multi-OS site, and staff collaborating on documents have no problem going back and forth between windows (XP, various office versions) and the macs (OSX, various versions). Thank god imo.

Poco, I don't know any Mac users who use a one-button mouse (I know, I saw your winky, I'm just sayin'). Not only is it counter-productive and annoying, the mice from Apple are shitty quality. They last about a week in the children's room, about a month anywhere else. Weak cables mostly. We let the public beat them up and replace them with two-button jobbies.

Bottom line, both mac and pc versions of Office are goddamned nice...but very bloated.

[Ezdaar]

Hi Lum,

If you'e able to, install Sidetrack on the laptop. It replaces the normal touchpad driver with one you can customize. I have mine set up for scrolling on the right side and right click as touching the pad. I also have corners for Expose and Dashboard. Works like a charm.

[voodoolily]

While I can't argue with the Mac's ease of use, I'm so goddamn sick of the shiny glass button look that has permeated the graphic design ethos since the release of the fruity Imacs.

You can actually change that in Appearance.

You can run games on Macs - I have the entire Myst series for it. BTW, I thought the new powerbooks were gonna have Intel inside.

[Samwise]

I just downloaded iTunes 5 the other day and found that in some sort of eerie display of mutual recursion, it had been reskinned to look more like Vista.  Which is itself a step toward the Mac look and feel, so go figure.  In another couple of years the two will pass each other going opposite directions.  Windows 2010 will look like Mac OS 9, and OS XII will look like Win 95.  I have foreseen it.

[Surlyboi]

No intel powerbooks til at least the second half of '07.

[Margalis]

It seems to me that they really revise the UI of each major new set of releases, but they don't really get any better, just different. They had the yellow/blue thing going for a while, now the Mac look, and VS.net had some other scheme. I don't really understand it.

[Surlyboi]

They don't understand it either, but if they were to just release it with the same look and feel, they wouldn't be able to charge you 300 bucks a license for it.

(Well, they'd try, but it'd be harder to justify)

[Venkman]

Macs are not serious gaming machines. They haven't been for a decade and there's little chance they will be in the future, no matter what core they use. Pure and obvious business reasons, regardless of the Unix core and them going Intel.

However, as a workstation, they are pure love, particularly Tiger (10.4). If I had the cash, I'd easily get a third machine at home just to do multimedia on a Mac. I'm dual computer at work (functional requirement, and no, there is no other way), and very much prefer my Mac for design and multimedia. This is mostly because of the OS. F9 and F10 are keys I hit almost as the Backspace key (75wpm unless you count mistakes, then it's 40 :) ). Basically, the UI for the OS was designed specifically to be used. Windows, on the other hand, was built to be suffered, and to be tinkered with. And notice I didn't say "designed". That is not synonymous with Windows.

I will say though I very much would prefer using MS Office on my PC. The Mac suite is sluggish. Granted, I'm comparing the latest Mac suite with Office on a Win2k box (which, yes, runs WoW quite nicely), and I do miss the real nice Tracking Changes functions from the Mac, but the whole experience is just slow.

And I don't use Entourage. It's not as sluggish, but it takes too damned long to update with the server, and is constantly out of sync with what's in Outlook Scheduler on the PC. Finally, it don't work with my iPaq, so that's just that. Granted, I'm ditchig the thing as soon as an office suite hits the PSP, but I'm in no rush.

Oh, and yea, Microsoft is pilfering Mac design theory. I doubt they'll get it right, though Vista's search feature does seem to one-up the Mac spyglass (or whatever it's called, the menu in the upperright corner). Apple designs. Microsoft distributes. Users win.

And Lum, get a wireless two-button mouse. I think the one I got was $35 at BestBuy. I love the Mac, but one-button anything is so 1988 :)

[schild]

When I was rendering and doing video editing and procedural stuff during college, I preferred to use a PC over a Mac. Macs are sluggish, sluggish pieces of ass with terribly bloated software. Shame, really. I used to be a diehard Mac fan, having owned multiple powerbooks and desktops. Now? You couldn't really pay me to use one on any sort of regular basis.

[Trippy]

And before the peanut gallery pipes up, I *know* I can't run any games on the Mac.

WoW runs on the Mac -- what other game do you need?

[jpark]

When I did my phd around 1998 I bought a high end mac system rather than a pc since I needed to do 3D work that was user fiendly to a guy like me.  Some of the 3 D models were made from brain activity patterns - so more than just building the models - I also needed the ability to slice them.

In the world of business I find you can get away with a PC - most of us are not introducing ground breaking ideas - but in basic research - especially with the 3 D brain imaging stuff I was doing at the time - my Mac was my lifeline.  The graphics in my research literally blew my department away.

I am not a technical / computer saavy guy at all - so the Mac platform was crucial in allowing me access to software on the Mac I could actually become proficient in.  Of course, even at academic pricing, the cost of the some of the software was comparable to my hardware purchase itself  :-D

In US dollars, I blew - including software - about 10 K on my system.  Outrageous I know - but my "uber" mac system easily shaved off a year of research time - which in opportunity cost is far more than the cost of the system itself.

[Pococurante]

In US dollars, I blew - including software - about 10 K on my system.

Nope not at all.  I've blown that on one system.  Since 1987 I've owned more such systems than I care to count.  At least now it's SMT so I don't bother doing my own solder hacks.

[Tebonas]

I'm waiting for a chipset cooler for my PC for about a month now and in this time I used my Powerbook to do all things I used to do on my PC (yes including WoW, although its quite a bit slower). I rarely miss the PC anymore. I think once I've got a PS3 and no groundbreaking PRGs are coming for the PC, I can dump my Windows box for good.

[Lum]

I did notice it ran fairly slow when importing about 3 gigs of email. Then again, well, um, it was 3 gigs of email.

Still, it's not like word processing or web browsing is fairly CPU intensive normally. And I LOVE the hyperantialiasing Mac displays do. So much easier on the eyes.

Any Mac users have feedback on Entourage? Should I use OSX's included mail, Entourage or Thunderbird? My priority here is a working spam filter - I have an 8-year old email address so it gets a LOT of spam.

[Sky]

I can ask around, people here use all three of those clients (I use Entourage). However, I don't get spam, so I don't use a filter.

Right now I'm on the list for an upgrade, I'm on a 700MHz G4 with 1GB RAM. It does what I need it to very snappy, just slows down when I bog it with a lot of tasks: surfing, burning an iphoto cd, listening to itunes (which is a resource hog on winders, too), email proggy in the background.

I sure wouldn't mind an intel mini, they're nice little machines (that is, the G4 minis we have now). I really, really hope they don't go the way of the cube.

[squirrel]

I use both OSX Mail and Entourage for 2 different mailboxes. Reason being Entourage (2K4) is better at supporting Exchange which my corporate address is, but i prefer the Mail interface. Entourage has some nice features though - if you're an Outlook junkie and want your contacts, calendar, notes, tasks and mail all in one place Entourage is the way to go. Since i synch via BT to a bunch of devices i prefer to use the Mac Address, Calendar as they are easier to manage via iSync. Bottom line - i use Entourage for Exchange mailbox and calendaring but stick to OSX apps for personal email and PIM stuff.

Oh and Haemish - they are pretty much done with the lickable interface - take a look at the latest iTunes or Mail apps for the direction they're going in.

I still have a pc for gaming but to be honest as i only play WoW and Shadowbane and console games my laptop has been the primary axe for sometime. Only when raiding MC do i use the PC and even then a recent .5 gig ram upgrade makes that doable on my mac.

oh and Spotlight = LOVE.

[Righ]

Sun, HP and IBM Unix systems for serious business.

Windows boxes for playing games and running stolen office software from work.

Macs for creative and Internet stuff when you don't want to spend evenings debugging a games box.

This is a games site full of youthful people who steal software. You are expected to be Windows zealots.

[Hanzii]

Sun, HP and IBM Unix systems for serious business.

Windows boxes for playing games and running stolen office software from work.

Macs for creative and Internet stuff when you don't want to spend evenings debugging a games box.

This is a games site full of youthful people who steal software. You are expected to be Windows zealots.

Heh, I work in a rather creative environment which is also very profitable - our first major leap (which had the old guys shaking) was when we moved from Quark to InDesign and now were slowly moving from Mac to PC. Of course we'll have to kill every member of our IT-department first - Mac zealots can't be swayed, but the people adept at more than burning through company funds on overpriced and underperforming hardware has seen the light.

Apple makes good MP3-players.

(no dig on Lums machine. That seems to be the perfect use of a Mac - after reviewing the Mac Mini I was slightly in love and considered buying one for the wife for that very purpose. Mail, internet and easy support)

[Surlyboi]

Given the choice between overpriced, underpowered hardware and overpriced, underperforming, insanity inducing software, I'll take the latter.