No Office For You! Come Back, One Year.

Posted by Keith Hahn, Aug 02, 2007, 9:55am

office 2007.jpg Due to "quality issues," Microsoft won't release Office 2007 on Macs until 2008, instead of the second half of 2007 as originally promised. By quality issues Microsoft means issues with Mac's growing market share and continued attempts to try and jumpstart Vista sales. That, or it's displaced anger over entering the portable music market and still getting teased about the Zune.

Microsoft is also holding out on the eventual price point, saying that the new Mac Office will cost somewhere between a PS3 and something else you don't want to buy.

What Microsoft doesn't realize is that it is encouraging users to make the switch to Macs. After all, the Office 2007 suite is a resource hogging, 50% prettier and 50% less functional version of its predecessor. Microsoft prepares you for this frustration right off the bat, putting the new Office in an un-openable package (pictured, and it took the DB offices at least 10 minutes and three steam powered drills to get that thing open). Empowered by the knowledge that business managers can't upgrade, users know there has never been a better time to switch to a Mac.

Mac version sales make up about a fifth of total Office sales, up from about 4% in 2001.

Microsoft assures us that one visit to the Genius Bar in the Apple store is a quick remedy to a Mac buying impulse (wait, you're a "genius" because you live in Williamsburg and can't fix my computer?). Personally, we're still waiting for Apple to invent the right-click on their mice.

Microsoft Delays Office for Mac Release [amNewYork]

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Posted in: Apple, Microsoft

Comments

Posted by John Doe, Aug 02, 2007 10:03AM

Um, didn't Apple add the right click already?

Posted by Random Banker, Aug 02, 2007 10:18AM

1) Macs already have right click
1.5) Hahn as noted earlier you are a sub par analyst... what kind of shit show uses a mouse in the first place?
2) This is actually good news as each incremental version of Microsoft office appears to make the software WORSE not better
3) The Mac Platform has a little known but COMPLETELY fatal flaw which prevents it from being useful for any business purpose... the lack of an ALT key.... thereby rendering virtually all keyboard short cuts useless thereby dooming the user to Keith Hahn like Tier 3 performance

Posted by kigol, Aug 02, 2007 10:20AM

mac's only flaw is its inception

Posted by jane, Aug 02, 2007 10:25AM

RB: right on...i almost switched to a mac but thankfully tried to use excel first. without "ALT+E+S+V" (among others) i would lose it

Posted by , Aug 02, 2007 10:36AM

wow random banker, you're a big deal

Posted by Anon, Aug 02, 2007 10:36AM

"After all, the Office 2007 suite is a resource hogging, 50% prettier and 50% less functional version of its predecessor."

Not true. Excel 2007 is totally amazing, awesome and cool. The interface is far superior to anything ever seen before and will have a significant, positive impact on productivity. Have you seen the gradient colors conditional formatting thing? It makes my trading spreadsheets 50% prettier AND 50% more effective. Excel Services is also incredible, allowing spreadsheet computations to be offloaded onto a grid and making it possible to remotely view spreadsheets through a web browser. It also has a new API, etc, etc. The only major disappointment with Excel 2007 is that it's still using a 30 year old programming language called VBA.

Posted by Bess Levin, Aug 02, 2007 10:40AM

Random banker-- I feel compelled at this time to tell you that Hahn rarely, if ever, uses a mouse, and constantly berates/throws shit at me for using one myself and polluting the airwaves with the "click click click" sound.

Posted by , Aug 02, 2007 10:50AM

you could just sub the "/" for the ALT....problem solved? Not really, I'm still not switching to a mac
And yes, I think your appraisal of Excel is wrong, '07 is not so bad at all

Posted by , Aug 02, 2007 11:02AM

is working at DB really an excel-heavy environment anyway

judging by the super high quality of the graphics you use on these posts (e.g. crab hands, subtle shading of the brian hunter fish picture, etc) i always assumed you guys are mostly working on tablets anyway

Posted by , Aug 02, 2007 11:08AM

ps that is not sarcasm i really love the graphics

Posted by , Aug 02, 2007 11:49AM

Keith - for some reason you suddenly think all of your readers in finance are creative types who work at starbucks? We use PCs, we use Office and we love Excel...know your audience before you insult...

Posted by , Aug 02, 2007 11:52AM

"Mac version sales make up about a fifth of total Office sales, up from about 4% in 2001."

Hey journalists...this relates only to "retail" sales according the article you link...and only a tiny fraction of MS sales come from retail...

Posted by , Aug 02, 2007 11:55AM

ya, there is no other way to buy mac office, is there? It's not like any single big company in the world actually uses macs... (sorry DB, you're a massive conglomerate, I know...)

Posted by , Aug 02, 2007 11:55AM

ya, there is no other way to buy mac office, is there? It's not like any single big company in the world actually uses macs... (sorry DB, you're a massive conglomerate, I know...)

Posted by Reiiit, Aug 02, 2007 12:16PM

So how do you drag the formula to multiple cells if you don't use a mouse?

Posted by anon, Aug 02, 2007 12:23PM

Reiit, Random Banker is really in IT. He doesn't need a mouse to code all those backoffice Unix scripts.

Posted by Dirk, Aug 02, 2007 12:27PM

Also to note for the "it will suck anyway" file: the new version of Excel for Mac will NOT have VBA. They are stripping it out.

Of course you can run regular Windows Excel on a mac using parallels.

Posted by inIT4the$, Aug 02, 2007 12:36PM

Reiiit,

enter formula in cell, use arrow key to highlight said cell, ctrl+c, highlight all the cells with shift+arrow that you want the formula to go into, alt+e+s, f for formula, enter/GO

Posted by , Aug 02, 2007 1:44PM

it's actually called Office 2008, not 2007 - research is your friend. While it's the complement of 2007 for windows, there are always additional/different features in the mac versions, and the releases are usually staggered a bit. read it straight from Roz Ho's (not a name i envy) mouth back January:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2007/jan07/01-09Macworld.mspx

from: http://www.macrumors.com/2007/08/02/microsoft-office-2008-delayed-until-january-2008/

"Lingering bugs were cited as the reason for the delay:

'It really is just a quality issue across the board,' Craig Eisler, general manager of Microsoft's Macintosh business unit, said in an interview Wednesday.

Other factors blamed for the delay included the switch to Intel combined with a change in Office file formats. "It was no one thing. 'This release was harder than most just because of all those things happening at once.'"

Posted by Random Banker, Aug 02, 2007 1:53PM

inIT4the$: Please don't humor Reiiit... that question deserves no answer...

Anon 12:23 that is correct, I work in IT my name is Gopal I live in a small village outside of Banglahore

Posted by keyboard lover, Aug 02, 2007 2:07PM

As a heads up, Macs don't have Alt in the same way, but to get to the top menubar you can use Ctrl+F2.

Getting things done definitely takes more keystrokes.

Posted by Random Banker, Aug 02, 2007 2:31PM

I am a aware of Ctrl+F2 phenom. It is not very useful. Especially because the menus do not have key strokes built in. So Ctrl+ F2+S+V will not give you a paste values but instead will send random menus flying up and accomplish nothing.

... I know this because I own a Mac... as I have since 1994... However I do not use it for any business related endeavors

Posted by Reiiit, Aug 02, 2007 3:34PM

inIT4the$, thank you.

Random Banker, blow me.

-Reiiit

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