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Microsoft Office 2008 Delayed Until January 2008

Article not originally quoted in it's entirety.

"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.
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He continued, "We really just don't have any [quality]. That's the fundamental problem we seem to be encountering here, as with Vista, and many other products we make. Our hope is that by 2008 Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) will have released an updated version of iWork, and everyone here at Microsoft will be off the hook."
 
pale9 said:
wow, getting office for mac to run on the intel processor IS SUCH A HUGE TASK! we have no experience in that area! the thousands of programmers we employ are all tied up with more important stuff, like the vista menu button...
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You obviously are completely ignorant about software development. Microsoft products are built for incredible resiliency among an enormous array of hardware and software interdependencies. Sure MS is freakin slow on releasing the stuff, but Apple is no whiz either. Apple has an extremely limited hardware and software set to program for and they are still LATE with Leopard. MS probably wants it to work beautifully with Leopard but Apple can't get their act together and get it finalized. Apple's delays translate into delays for Microsoft. Apple is not capable of the same level of quality and bulletproof engineering in unsanitized environments, as evidenced by the continual problems with iTunes, Quicktime and Safari for PC.
 
Black Belt said:
Microsoft products are built for incredible resiliency among an enormous array of hardware and software interdependencies.
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Indeed - and given this Herculean task, I've always been impressed at what Microsoft has been able to manage. I can't think of another software company that's even close to being up to that particular job.

Black Belt said:
Apple is not capable of the same level of quality and bulletproof engineering in unsanitized environments, as evidenced by the continual problems with iTunes, Quicktime and Safari for PC.
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Agreed again, though in these forums, you may have signed your own death warrant. ;) Of the examples you gave, I'd say iTunes is the most glaring; it's inexcusable for it to continue to have the issues with Vista that it does this long after Vista's release.
 
Like anyone's really surprised it's going to be delayed due to a "quality issue across the board." What else is new, Microsoft?

Remember when Vista's in-progress name was Longhorn? Had to be almost completely rewritten because the infrastructure was like a house of cards. That's Microsoft for you. Poor programming off the front end and they don't go back and fix it until darn near the targeted release date, so they push it back 6-12 months. Not surprised. It's only been four years, what's another year gonna matter? Just my $.02.
 
Office 2008 Delay - iWork

SWC said:
I'm not sure where you get your info but works is NOT bundled with vista. Sure it comes on mostnew PC's but that is up to the OEM not something in vista by default.
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Yes, you are right - apologies; I was referring to this news story:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6927491.stm

in which it is claimed MS will be offering MS Works as a free download (though it will contain ads).

KW
 
Who cares? Even though it will be universal, it will probably be slower than 2004, just like 2004 was far slower than the already slow v.X. I still have v.X and see no reason to "upgrade" I think 98 was the first version in years that had new functions I actually use.
 
Rotflol

p0intblank said:
Apple has had delays, but none near the magnitude of Microsoft.
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That's hysterical, almost spit my coffee.

I suggest that you check Apple history for the terms "Pink", "Copland" and "Rhapsody" - if you really believe that Apple is any better than other software companies at bringing big projects in on schedule.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhapsody_(operating_system)
 
guitarman777 said:
Like anyone's really surprised it's going to be delayed due to a "quality issue across the board." What else is new, Microsoft?

Remember when Vista's in-progress name was Longhorn? Had to be almost completely rewritten because the infrastructure was like a house of cards. That's Microsoft for you. Poor programming off the front end and they don't go back and fix it until darn near the targeted release date, so they push it back 6-12 months. Not surprised. It's only been four years, what's another year gonna matter? Just my $.02.
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Yes, they had been carrying forward some old code to maintain compatibility with older programs and software. Vista was a fresh rewrite (I'd like to see Apple try that one!) and they STILL managed to have incredible backwards compatibility, something Apple never could pull off. And as MS products are constantly under attack from hackers, something Apple has never had to deal with because of their low marketshare, they also wanted to greatly enhance security which has resulted in a remarkably stable and secure environment. Coming up on a year with no major exploits. An incredible feat of software engineering.
 
Seems Perfectly Reasonable To Me

What's all the hubbub? With Leopard not out 'til November, two months for Microsoft to make sure most of the bugs are squashed seems very fast to me. January at MacWorld is a perfect time to launch it. :)
 
If you're looking for a word processor that does .doc files but you don't need fancy schmancy features like embedded images, try Bean. It opens as fast as textedit, but its got most general Word features.

And best of all its free.

Bean is a small, easy-to-use word processor that includes:

* a live word count
* a Get Info panel for in-depth statistics
* a zoom-slider to easily change the view scale
* an Inspector panel with lots of sliders
* date-stamped backups
* autosaving
* a page layout mode
* an alternate colors option (e.g., white text on blue)
* an option to show invisible characters (tabs, returns, spaces)
* selection of text by text style, paragraph style, color, etc.
* a floating windows option (like Stickies has)
* easy to use menus
* remembers cursor postion (excluding .txt, .html, .webarchive formats)
* all of Cocoa's good stuff (dictionary, word completion, etc.)
 
This is the very reason I got iWork. Every other critical app is now a Universal Binary and has been for quite some time. What's their deal? I can't say this was unexpected though.
 
MS Project back for Mac OS X?!

So are they finally brining MS Project back for Mac OS X?! The last Mac version was 4.0! :-(
 
I am fine with Office 2004. They should really drop the price on the student edition of 2004 to $49.99. And give a coupon for 25% off the new 2008 student edition with every box from now until 2008 is released.
 
Eraserhead said:
Then you need to make your presentation on a PC, I have seen strange issues of powerpoint screwing up with simple user interface elements from PC to Mac powerpoint so it isn't perfect.

The only way to guarantee your presentation will work is to bring your own laptop/cables, Macs can export to DVI, VGA or S-Video so should be able to work with any projector and then you can use Keynote.
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guarantee? wow...i'm an audio/video technician that specializes in computer support for corporate conferences and i've seen plenty of times where a person's laptop takes a dump in the middle of the presentation. they forgot to charge the battery, they didn't bring their power cord, they put the system to sleep after a short period of time, their video card doesn't like being attached to a projector, their video card isn't robust enough to play the video on the local screen and the projector, they forgot the adaptor for dvi to vga, yadda yadda yadda.....

one of the companies i work for typically requires presenters to submit their presentations to a centralized "speaker ready room" beforehand. it's then run off of our machines in the meeting room; desktop machines with robust video cards, fast hard drives, and plenty of ram. and we have a backup machine in the meeting room. in many cases we have macs in the room as well but for those times when we don't we convert it over to a pc and most of the time it's without too many hiccups. when a problem does occur we fix it.

mac to pc powerpoints do indeed have their issues from time to time. most of the time it is because the mac user doesn't run the office compatibility check to see what will work on the pc side of things. most often they used tiffs instead of jpgs or they relied heavily on transparencies or used fonts not available on the pc system.

now that being said, every last one of these issues can be dealt with if you have a mac to work on. export the tiffs to jpgs, you can export entire slides to jpgs or pngs and then reimport the images, if the slide has animations you can import it multiple times and rebuild it by cropping to the various elements you want to appear or disappear. so on, and so on.

i'm personally looking forward to office 2008 to see if it is more compatible between mac and pc. it would solve a lot of my "busy" work and free me up to take care of other things.
 
I just heard from a friend, who works at MS, that the main reason for the delay is Clippy the Paper Clip is being totally revamped with support for core image. They're also going to include a UB version of the new Microsoft Bob 2008 BETA that requires a minimum of 2 GB RAM, 2.2 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, and Microsoft Silverlight to be installed. They recommend you install a patch that replaces dashboard with MS Bob. :confused:
 
garethh said:
I do hope they use the time to make Entourage fully Exchange compliant. My uni email is being transferred to Exchange very soon and if I have to use Entourage, I hope it works more reliably than other people I know here have found it.

Actually, I wish Apple made Mail and iCal fully Exchange compliant. That would be much better.
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Won't happen. They can do it, but choose not to. It will most likely never have feature parity with the Windows version.
 
nimbusthegreat said:
guarantee? wow...i'm an audio/video technician that specializes in computer support for corporate conferences and i've seen plenty of times where a person's laptop takes a dump in the middle of the presentation. they forgot to charge the battery, they didn't bring their power cord, they put the system to sleep after a short period of time, their video card doesn't like being attached to a projector, their video card isn't robust enough to play the video on the local screen and the projector, they forgot the adaptor for dvi to vga, yadda yadda yadda.....
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Well I'm assuming that the presenter is competent so would remember those things ;). But as you seem to have a good setup I'm sure you could deal with the problems beforehand.
 
So would this mark the first time in history that a product with a year in the title actually comes out that calendar year? :eek:

(You know, since products branded as '08 come out in '07, and then '09 stuff will come out in '08 and so on?)
 
p0intblank said:
Apple has had delays, but none near the magnitude of Microsoft.
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Haha, thanks for the laugh. :D

To familiarize yourself and better educate yourself regarding Apple's history of product delays and such, I suggest you follow Aiden Shaw's advice and look up Copland, Rhapsody and the like. Good reading. :cool:
 
phasornc said:
...

When MacBU announced second have of 2007, Leopard was supposed to be out in July. Now no one likes to go through a major software release, and really there's Office and CS are the biggest things out there, and then have to do a substantial rewrite 2 months later. I think spotlight took the MacBS by suprise last time. The had to do a lot of rewriting to take advantage of it, because people expect it. But they weren't able to heavily promote it. I bet they are just waiting for the final Leopard to see if any there are any surprises that would integrate with the office suite and provide some nice advertising headlines on release day.

....
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Perhaps MSoffice 08 is going to take advantage of Leopard features like Core Animation.
 
addicted44 said:
I started off really liking the ribbon interface. However, when I started doing some heavy spreadsheeting, it got extremely annoying switching between the 2 tabs that i use most often. For most people this should not be an issue, but I dont think the new interface is very suitable for heavy users of Office.
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Ah, well, aside from the occasional glimpse at a timetable spreadsheet I've barely used Excel in Office 2007 (or 2004, come to that... since finishing my degree I have had practically no need to use it). I spend most of my time in Word with regular forays into PowerPoint. Valid point though - just because Office 2007 suits the way I work doesn't mean it's going to be the same for everyone else :)
 
p0intblank said:
Apple has had delays, but none near the magnitude of Microsoft.
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Sure they do (I'm still waiting for that 3GHz PowerMac G5 Steve promised us that we'd have by 2004 ;)). It's just that with Apple and their infernal secrecy about every future product and refusing to confirm or deny release dates until they actually arrive fewer people notice, because fewer people realise that there's even been a delay. Microsoft on the other hand blabber about any and every little they're working on years in advance, so if something is delayed or ends up being somehow different from their original intent it sticks out like a sore thumb. It's a case of counting the hits and ignoring the misses, I think - sorry :eek:
 
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