David Weiss is the new Robert Scoble to me (only ten times less obnoxious and thirty times more Mac relevant). While the Mac mojo blog is interesting on occasion, getting an unfiltered (or at least I assume unfiltered) opinion from a genuine Microsoft employee is insightful. Considering my prediction of a large part of the market dumping their established Office product, I’ve always wondered what their reaction was.
Allowing anyone to read and write your file format is a bold move because it says in essence, “We don’t need a locked down file format to compete. The format can be available for everyone, and we’ll compete on the ease of use and efficiency of our applications. We have what we think is the best interface for reading, creating and managing Office documents, but if someone has what they think is a better way to build Office documents, wonderful, we welcome it!”
What Apple has done with Keynote, Pages and Numbers is exactly this. With each one of their applications, they’ve created a user interface that reflects how they think people want or should want to act when building a presentation, document or spreadsheet. I’ve been in this market for a long time, and obviously have opinions about how things should be done. If someone else has what they think is a good solution for building Office documents, I think that’s great.
While you can’t necessarily infer that Microsoft’s entire power structure feels this way, it’s good to see that Microsoft seems to be welcoming the competition. Considering the price of Apple’s suite, you may be wondering what Office brings to the table.
Finally, as in the past, the question will undoubtedly be asked, “What is the core value of Office on the Mac?” I’ll answer that with one word: compatibility. Mac users are the kind of people that want things to “just work” and Microsoft Office for the Mac offers that exact value proposition. Mac users want to enjoy all the great things that make the Mac experience wonderful, but still be able to share documents and communicate in a Mac way in a Windows dominated world. MacBU is categorically in the best position to deliver on this promise of compatibility.
In other words: inertia. Because people already use Office, they’ll keep using it. That said, this compatibility may be overstated when one takes the decision to drop Visual Basic scripting support into account. That’s going to create a bit of a gulf, particularly in corporate environments.
It's not exactly inertia. Working with Windows users means exchanging Office documents. Since iWork is Mac-only, it cannot offer that level of compatibility. Users on both platforms could move to OpenOffice, but iWork is simply not a threat in that situation.
Of course, after Safari was released for Windows, I wouldn't bet against a Windows version of iWork; although that would be a surprising move.
Of course, you nailed it on the scripting support. Once you've lost 100% compatibility, translating into iWork or OpenOffice becomes a much more viable way to work.
The Microsoft guy is spinning a bit by portraying iWork as a way of reading and writing Office documents. Although these products can import and export Office documents they are not based on them.
When you save a document form Pages it has a .pages extension. You can export as a Word .doc file. You can also open a .doc file, but you'd need to export the file again to get it back to a Word user.
Pages is not an alternative editor for Word documents, but is a full fledged competitor.
I've gotten into the bad habit of doing all my word processing in InDesign or BBEdit, but I'm going to make a stab at doing letters and other simple documents in Pages to see how it goes.
compatibility? since when is Microsoft Office on the Mac compatible with Microsoft Office on Windows? MacBU cant even do decent software properly.
I think you hit the nail on the head with Visual Basic compatibility issue.