[mrmister]

What do people think? I'm excited about it, as even though i use a lot of other apps, Entourage is the only mail client that keeps up with my needs.

i *really* wish that they would not need the giant database--i find that a real downside.

[workerbee]

Originally posted by mrmister:
i *really* wish that they would not need the giant database--i find that a real downside.

Yep, that was one of the main reasons I switched to Mail.app, where I miss a lot of Entourage's nicer features.

[k2director]

After almost two years of MS Office on OS X, this is all Microsoft comes up with? I'm just a bit uninspired.

Honestly, it feels like MS doesn't know what to do with Office, how to evolve it. Even on Windows, the updates don't add many features that your average user can really appreciate.

Apple could eat MS's lunch with an Apple Office, ala iLife. An Apple word processor and spreadsheet program wouldn't have all the features of Word or Excel, but it would satisfy 80-90% of the market, and be a lot easier to use. On the other hand, Apple NEEDS to have MS Office on the Mac for appearances of legitimacy, and for 100% document compatibility. And launching Apple Office would probably force Microsoft to pull the plug.

It all reminds me of a scene from a typical John Woo movie: two characters face off, one has a gun to the other's head, and the other has a knife to the other's throat.

Personally, I wish Apple had the guts to pull the trigger....

[you_are_right]

Originally posted by k2director:
After almost two years of MS Office on OS X, this is all Microsoft comes up with? I'm just a bit uninspired.

Honestly, it feels like MS doesn't know what to do with Office, how to evolve it. Even on Windows, the updates don't add many features that your average user can really appreciate.

Apple could eat MS's lunch with an Apple Office, ala iLife. An Apple word processor and spreadsheet program wouldn't have all the features of Word or Excel, but it would satisfy 80-90% of the market, and be a lot easier to use. On the other hand, Apple NEEDS to have MS Office on the Mac for appearances of legitimacy, and for 100% document compatibility. And launching Apple Office would probably force Microsoft to pull the plug.

It all reminds me of a scene from a typical John Woo movie: two characters face off, one has a gun to the other's head, and the other has a knife to the other's throat.

Personally, I wish Apple had the guts to pull the trigger....

Sad but true.

Have a look at apple's web page...they praise M$ Office as the suite for corporate needs and put iLife as its counterpart for the private needs.

This tells me, there will be no iWrite or whatsoever....office will be the mainstream suite for the word processing stuff etc. until the end of days on both major platforms.

Apple is clearly going stronger than ever into the multi media corner...especially into multi media for eveybody..not a bad strategy, unless u want to get into a real price war.

I think for the corporate business the game is over, at least for a long time ahead. Except for music, video and partly desktop publishing etc.

I am using my Mac mainly as the audio source for my hifi system. Since we have AAC and digital outputs this works perfect.

[DavideMac]

Sure your uninspired, it's people like you that get developers working on new useless features on super buggy software. I believe iLife is a great example (iTunes maybe not so much). SUPERBUGGY but hey, it's got new features. And to think it took Apple to the year 2004 to be able to write a program where photos could be displayed rather quickly. Now that's "innovation"... oh I'm sorry, is that a new 'feature"?

At least Microsoft can make a mail app for Mac that works. Microsoft Office in PC or Mac is one of the best programs you'll ever work with PERIOD! And don't even bother bringing up that opensource software cause it's not even in the same league. I'm the first to admit I'm not a MS fan but lets leave the favoritism thing in the corner when it comes to judging and using good, stable software.

[Busemann]

I'm glad Office 2004 is taking the direction its headed. They don't unnecessary bloat it with features just for the features sake, but rather incorporate useful touches like the improved printing capabilities of Excel. I think Office 2004 will be a great product and am glad Apple don't waste R&D money on making a "iWorks" suite that would probably take years to mature anyways.

[Russian Mac fan]

I hope Entourage is revamped to sync with Palm's categories in the datebook application. Then I can dump Palm Desktop and Personal Organizer from Chronos

[Russian Mac fan]

QUESTION: Where the new Apple Works then? Or is Apple abandoning it?

[voodoo]

If Office 2004 supports unicode and is more stable than v.X then I'm all for it.

That is all I want from Office really. Some of the new features look pretty neat too especially for students in lectures

[bluesloth]

So do you think they did any real work on the guts. Office is a real CPU hog. Word on my powerbook takes 11% CPU with no windows open. That doesn't help my battery life too much.

[chrisutley]

Apple would have to be assured of providing 100% compatibility with the important MS Office apps for now and well into the future if this were going to work. Anything short of providing 100% compatibility would be a huge mistake.

Whenever I talk to potential switchers, the first thing they almost always ask about is Office and/or Outlook. Often they need Outlook to access their office email systems, etc.. I don't have to explain why they need Word, Excel, etc..

Go look at Apple's software portfolio. It's growing into a very impressive collection. I think they should continue to focus on the creative side of things, and let Microsoft run with the productivity software.

Originally posted by k2director:
After almost two years of MS Office on OS X, this is all Microsoft comes up with? I'm just a bit uninspired.

Honestly, it feels like MS doesn't know what to do with Office, how to evolve it. Even on Windows, the updates don't add many features that your average user can really appreciate.

Apple could eat MS's lunch with an Apple Office, ala iLife. An Apple word processor and spreadsheet program wouldn't have all the features of Word or Excel, but it would satisfy 80-90% of the market, and be a lot easier to use. On the other hand, Apple NEEDS to have MS Office on the Mac for appearances of legitimacy, and for 100% document compatibility. And launching Apple Office would probably force Microsoft to pull the plug.

It all reminds me of a scene from a typical John Woo movie: two characters face off, one has a gun to the other's head, and the other has a knife to the other's throat.

Personally, I wish Apple had the guts to pull the trigger....

[Joel]

Originally posted by you_are_right:
Sad but true.

Have a look at apple's web page...they praise M$ Office as the suite for corporate needs and put iLife as its counterpart for the private needs.

This tells me, there will be no iWrite or whatsoever....

Well, this doesn't necessarily mean anything. I remember back when OS 10.0 came out. Jobs made a big to-do about Internet Explorer being bundled, etc, etc. A couple of years later they released their own browser. In any case, it's important that Microsoft Office works on Macs for the time being. If Microsoft makes any drastic moves toward "securing" their file formats or starts increasing its license on their file format (now patented, I believe), that's when Apple should make its move. With the Xserve, Xserve RAID, and Xserve Cluster units, Apple is already starting to target the corporate world somewhat aggressively. If a company already used Apple servers and Microsoft pulled some stunt with their file formats, Apple could conveniently offer an alternative. Shoot, it could even be cross-platform like Appleworks. Anyhow... Back to reality for a while...

-Joel

[::maroma::]

Originally posted by chrisutley:
Apple would have to be assured of providing 100% compatibility with the important MS Office apps for now and well into the future if this were going to work. Anything short of providing 100% compatibility would be a huge mistake.

Whenever I talk to potential switchers, the first thing they almost always ask about is Office and/or Outlook. Often they need Outlook to access their office email systems, etc.. I don't have to explain why they need Word, Excel, etc..

Go look at Apple's software portfolio. It's growing into a very impressive collection. I think they should continue to focus on the creative side of things, and let Microsoft run with the productivity software.

I agree with this completely. The more software and hardware products Apple offers, the less money/support goes in to all of the others. I would also say leave the business side of things to MS and the Pro image editing apps to Adobe/Macromedia. Concentrate on owning the pro audio and consumer side of things.

[QTI]

Originally posted by chrisutley:
Apple would have to be assured of providing 100% compatibility with the important MS Office apps for now and well into the future if this were going to work. Anything short of providing 100% compatibility would be a huge mistake.

Can't agree more.

I wouldn't have switched 2.5 years ago if I wasn't sure about 100% Word compatibility.

[JKT]

Regardless of whether or not Apple should develop an Office equivalent or not, AppleWorks itself (as a basic Office suite for the home user) is in desperate need of a revamp/update so that it doesn't SUCK. It's so embarrassingly bad as an OS X app at present, that it is barely worth installing on any Macs as part of the software bundle.

[sushiism]

Apple doing an office suite would be a waste of time, macs are not to fill up lifeless depressing cubicle hells where everyone drinks away their troubles at the weekend. (Think 'The Office', really want to see macs running garbage like that?) Let the talent do the good and fun stuff like Apple do and let the rifraff do the boring stuff like Office, same goes for operating systems.

P.s Is office in its current state 100% totally compatible, with macros and everything in excel and word documents? If not will the new one? my dad and his friend want to switch over but basically their jobs revolve around filling in spreadsheets and making way too much money from it some how

[dlefebvre]

Originally posted by k2director:
After almost two years of MS Office on OS X, this is all Microsoft comes up with? I'm just a bit uninspired.

^

It,s a word processor and a spreadsheet. How many feaure can you add? Do you really want a 1.5Gb word processor?

[MacGorilla]

Apple jumped in with Safari because M$ hadn't really updated it all in 2 years. While it released version after version for the PC, nothing happen on the Mac side.

Besides, M$ makes tons of money off MS Office for the Mac. They have at least incentive to to keep it up to date.

[OAW]

Originally posted by bluesloth:
So do you think they did any real work on the guts. Office is a real CPU hog. Word on my powerbook takes 11% CPU with no windows open. That doesn't help my battery life too much.

Indeed. I always shut down Word when I'm not using it for this very reason. Now Excel seems to play nicer. I can usually leave it running without any noticeable CPU impact.

OAW

[Devin Lane]

Originally posted by dlefebvre:
^

It,s a word processor and a spreadsheet. How many feaure can you add? Do you really want a 1.5Gb word processor?

Hey, instead of adding new features, why doesn't Microsoft just clean up what they have?

For starters: the user interface (the buttons, windows...) Basically, I am a UI perfectionist, and I find the UI for most of office (like the paragraph or font format dialog) to be absolutely awful. Perhaps it would be better if they used UI guidelines better. For example: if you open the styles window, then make a new style, you will notice that to get to other options of the style (font, paragraph, tabs...) you have to click a popup menu! That's horrible! How about instead having the style window be a tabview with tabs for each formating option? -- or is this an issue of cross-platform differences?

Also, their preview areas in the window would be soooooo much better if they used Quartz...

Anyway, I use Word all the time, and it is pretty good, but my mom uses it more and she finds tons of cases where it changes her formatting, alignment, font and paragraph attributes, etc., which is very annoying to her.

That are the things I would like to see fixed in a new version of office, not a bunch of new features I won't use.

[Wiskedjak]

Originally posted by k2director:
Honestly, it feels like MS doesn't know what to do with Office, how to evolve it. Even on Windows, the updates don't add many features that your average user can really appreciate.

Actually, my criticism of MS Office is that it is a little too evolved and has too many features. I think Office could do with a little deevolving ...

[Wiskedjak]

Originally posted by MacGorilla:
Apple jumped in with Safari because M$ hadn't really updated it all in 2 years. While it released version after version for the PC, nothing happen on the Mac side.

Unfortunately, how long has it been since the last Safari update?

[Busemann]

Originally posted by Wiskedjak:
Unfortunately, how long has it been since the last Safari update?

two months

1.2 is right around the corner

[k2director]

For the record, I wasn't suggesting that MS Office 2004 should have been overloaded with new features. I think it could use some siginificant reworking of its **APPROACH** to doing the straightforward tasks of writing, etc.

Case in point: Safari and Internet Explorer both let you create and manage bookmarks, but Safari is more intuitive. Same feature, really, but better executed by Apple. You could say the same thing for the iPod experience, and a ton of other Apple apps when compared to Windows apps with similar, on-paper feature sets.

If Microsoft took a fresh look at Office, and asked "How can we re-work what we already have so it's easier and more intuitive", they could certainly come up with many improvements....again, not necessarily additional features, but better executed features. Unfortunately, it's difficult for them to try this approach because so many people have become accustomed to Office as it works today, and any signficant changes would throw the legions of Office workers that make do with what they already have. Plus, MS just isn't known for good design.

I believe Apple will SOMEDAY release an Apple Office product. And I believe it will be a much easier, intuitive product for the vast majority of people. And that will be a good thing.

[clarkgoble]

I'd love Word to support the OSX font panel for a minimum. There are numerous OSX features, especially with Panther that I miss there. I admit that for the rest it is good enough. That's true on the PC side as well where MS has a problem with people not upgrading anymore.

[TheIceMan]

Did anyone else catch this part of the keynote? This is taken from a Live transcript from yesterday's MacWorld (It's towards the bottom half when they're talking about MS Office.

If you buy a copy of Office 10, you get a free upgrade to Office 2004 when available in the spring.

Can someone verify that this is correct or not? Thanks.

[Update:] Ok, I watched the MacWorld Keynote on QuickTime again to double-check. Time marker 00:23:56-00:24:07
the MS rep, Roz Ho, said:

"Starting today (I'm assuming Jan.6) if you buy Office v.X, you'll get a free upgrade to Office 2004 when the product is available in the spring.

Ok, so I would have to buy Office v.X between Jan. 6 and before Office 2004 comes out. SUCKS!

[lookmark]

I'm still hoping Apple will soon release a Cocoa successor to AppleWorks... a friendly, solid, consumer-friendly office suite, of the 'works variety.

I mean, AppleWorks can't stay bundled w/ their "consumer" machines with no major updates forever, can it?

The lack of a word processor alternative to MS Word (which you can't even buy seperately from Office, whether you like it or not) I think is starting to become really glaring.

(And no, I don't consider the interface-explosion Mellel, the egregious new Nissus Writer or the clunky Mariner Write very acceptable alternatives.)

[OptimusG4]

Originally posted by TheIceMan:
Ok, so I would have to buy Office v.X between Jan. 6 and before Office 2004 comes out. SUCKS!

Um on Mactopia's site, its between now and June to qualify for the free upgrade.

[Scifience]

To all the people that think that Office is too evolved:

My personal opinion is that Word is quickly become the GUI version of the (in)famous emacs text editor for UNIX. Pretty soon, they'll have to put games in it!

Seriously, Office pretty much has everything people could possibly need at the moment. The bottom line is that Microsoft is greedy and wants to make more money off people ever two years, so they have to keep coming up with new crap to stick in.

[york28]

I couldn't let this go:

Originally posted by DavideMac:
...At least Microsoft can make a mail app for Mac that works. Microsoft Office in PC or Mac is one of the best programs you'll ever work with PERIOD! And don't even bother bringing up that opensource software cause it's not even in the same league. I'm the first to admit I'm not a MS fan but lets leave the favoritism thing in the corner when it comes to judging and using good, stable software.

MS Office does have some great features, and its a killer Office App, but, no, it is most definetally NOT one of the best programs I'll ever use period. I use it all the time at work, and it is actually right there at the bottom of my list along with iPhoto. Becoming the defacto standard does not make something the best at what it does.

Mail works great for me the last time I checked. Entourage has more features, but I'm rather sure it has its own set of problems.

MS Office may have features that others do not (some of which might even be useful) and it may also have no real competitors, but these points do not make it an inherently good product. This is, of course, my opinion, and I respect yours.

[passmaster16]

Having Office 2004 is actually good news. I wasn't certain if Microsoft would continue development on the Mac. As much as I like to maintain a Microsoft free system, it's hard to avoid Office when the business world uses it. My biggest complaint with Office v.X is, as others said, the amount of CPU it consumes. I've also found its all around speed to be slow, especially in Word even with special features like word count, spell and grammar check turned off. I would much rather keep the existing features and layout and trade it for some improvement to the guts of the app. Does anybody think this version will be better optimized so that it might be a little bit faster? I know that it will never run as good as the windows version, however, I think it can use some major optimization.

I agree with the other posters. Apple can't get into this segment with a product unless it has 100% compatibility with Office, and knowing how Microsoft operates, that might be difficult to achieve. I don't mind them having a consumer product like AppleWorks even if it does need major improvements, but I think at this point it would be counterproductive for Apple to develop a suite of this magnitude. The first thing people ask me if there is Office on the Mac. We might not like it but it's a necessary evil. Maybe Apple is working on something of their own. If they are, I wouldn't release it until they are sure that it can replace Office. I'm sure if they would release their own, that would be the end to Office on Mac.

[Wiskedjak]

Originally posted by TheIceMan:
Can someone verify that this is correct or not? Thanks.

[karbon]

Originally posted by chrisutley:
Apple would have to be assured of providing 100% compatibility with the important MS Office apps for now and well into the future if this were going to work. Anything short of providing 100% compatibility would be a huge mistake.

100% compatibility is impossible, you don't even get that on Windows. A Word or Excel file created in Office XP can show up rather fugly in Office 97.

Now, the Office for Mac is not 100% compatible with the Windows version either. Try putting PDF's and QuickTime movies in a PowerPoint file, then open it on a Windows machine. Or create a really complex Excel spread sheet with lots of macro's and wierd formatting! I've met many cases where Office doesn't give 100% compatibility...

[TheIceMan]

Wiskedjak & OptimusG4: Thanks for the info.

[MacGorilla]

MS Word, by itself, is a fine app. It is easy to use and configure, has nice feature and is robust. I like using it. No other word processor comes close (well koffice but thats still a pre-alpha aqua app).

Its when you pile on al; that other crap that Office begins to suck.

[theolein]

I think the reasons Apple hasn't made any updates to Appleworks are simply because they realise full well what that would entail: Microsoft dropping support for Office on the Mac. Microsoft is a corporation that only got where it has by ruthlessly killing off even the smallest amount of competition. Take a simple look at the huge amount of FUD that MS releases in its perpetual campaign against Linux.

Not only in the server space where MS is really being hit hard by Linux and where one would expect a "normal" company to double its efforts to compete, but also on the desktop, where Linux has a tiny marketshare of perhaps 3%. Look at how MS copies Apple's features (the Luna scheme in WinXP was introduced after Apple had brought out OSX, MS Moviemaker was made to compete with iMovie, Longhorn is being built to have a similar type of compositing engine like Quartz, MS is trying to start its own online music service and music player).

Microsoft does NOT play nice. An easy to use and modern Appleworks will make them drop Office for the Mac.

Likewise I think Apple's strategy since Jobs returned is to capture and hold markets in which it can dominate, and not fight useless and losing battles against entrenched competitors. If Apple were to say, introduce an Apple Photoshop killer, you can be sure that PS would soon be dropped for the Mac, just as Premier was.

In fact the only thing I can see that would encourage Apple to make its own versions of an Office and image editing app would be if OpenOffice and the Gimp started getting really large sections of marketshare, thereby breaking MS' and Adobe's hold on these markets. While I can certainly see OpenOffice doing this in a few years time (It works very well on Linux and Windows and has already started gaining enterprise marketshare) and while the Gimp has improved drastically with the new 2.0 version (take a look at some screenshots of it on Linux) it will be a while until and if these things happen.

So, in short, don't expect Apple to improve Appleworks anytime soon.

[LeeG]

Well, I wouldn't say M$ Office is one of the BEST apps out there, but it is the best word processor for mac (IMHO), as it offers compatibility with the business world.

Also, NEVER underestimate the psychological comfort people get hearing "yeah, macs run microsoft office". Even if they could do the same tasks easier or better with other software, the perception is to the ignorant public that Office is the only thing out there, and if someone's gonna switch, they want to feel reassured that they will be 'compatible'.

I agree, let apple focus on what they're best at - internet and multimedia. Let microsoft power all the cash registers and cubicle terminals they want.

As for the free upgrade, yeah its true, I downloaded the PDF rebate form, and then ordered Office online.

The thing that stinks is that you need to buy office between 1/6 and 6/30 - when the heck is Office 2004 gonna come out?? June!??

Lee

[Eug]

I will buy MS Office 2004, with VPC 7.0 too. (I already have Office v.X)

I will buy Keynote 2.0 when it comes out (hopefully soon).

And iLife '04 is already coming.

Hmmm... This is gonna be an expensive few months for software for Eug...

[MojoRising022]

Office 2004 is a necessary evil. Microsoft can bury Apple very quickly by ceasing development of Office and creating proprietary, non-compatible formats.

Apple needs Office for credibility as a business machine - simply put. No serious business user or new business would consider a Mac if they could not correspond with the 95% if PC users using Office. Even home users (students especially) need Office to work in a world full of misinformed people who think Windows is the superior product.

In terms of overall feature set - nothing compares to Office at this point. While it is not a killer app and while it is most certainly bloated, no other Office client for the Mac (or PC for that matter) can match up.

[Eug Wanker]

Originally posted by MojoRising022:
Office 2004 is a necessary evil.

Why is it an evil? It works well, and it doesn't fubar Macs. Evil would be something like AppleWorks. Well, that's not evil either, just not so good.

[MojoRising022]

Microsoft in general is evil....guilt by association. The app itself is fine for the most part.

It'd be nice to have a computer free of anything by MS, but it just is not feasible to work in an unfortunately Windows-dominated world without the ability to speak their language.

[DavideMac]

Guilt by association eh? Are you American MofoRising022? See where I'm going with this? I don't believe in guilt by association and I don't believe that MS Office is evil. If MS Office were a Mac software, everyone and I mean EVERYONE! would praise it's abilities and features to no end. I for one support MBU and hope that they continue the great work that they've done up to now and hope that they will always share our passion for the Mac platform.

It doesn't matter how many times you've used Office, you don't have a clue of it's abilities and features until someone truly sits down and demo's even a small portion of it. It's absolutely amazing and powerful.

And if you ask me, MSOffice 04 and iLife 04 all working on OS X has me pretty much covered. Life is Good!

[Eug]

I think the auto-fading-to-transparent palette is awesome in Office 2004. I wish more apps which use palettes had this feature.

I'm surprised at the lukewarm response the Microsoft programmers got for this. If it were an Apple app, people would be dancing in the aisles.

[besson3c]

The Office guy during the Keynote said something about being able to save projects to a server or to an iDisk. I'm really interested in this feature, as I have some clients looking for this kind of collaberation ability.

Does the Windows version of Office do this too? Any details on this feature in Office 2004?

[Superchicken]

They're microsoft they really can't expect that much at a Macworld show can they?

Anyway I am tempted to buy word but ultimately I think I'll just stick with text edit and apple works. That said they really should revamp Appleworks or intigrate things like word count, and a few other features from Appleworks into text edit. Because TextEdit if you use it actually had a LOT of features for basic use. They just need a formating pallet and a few other things. I think if apple showed off TextEdit with basic word functions like footnotes and a few other things for just straight good paper writing they'd have a hit. OR in all seriousness if apple wanted to make a HUGE hit with college students they would make a TextEdit capable of easy double spacing without putting in the number just .5 1 1.5 and 2 for spacing. And put in a Turabian or APA or MLA wizzard like thing. You know where it would automatically format it to whatever writing format you chose. Maybe even have a grammer check that was specific, you know informal paper you could use conjunctions formal paper it would point it out. That sorta thing.
And I don't think it would take so much time... but dang if I told the guys at College here that I had a program that made it so I never had to worry about Turabian I could have em all planning to buy Macs for their next computers. Esspecially all the guys in the Theology programs.

[besson3c]

Originally posted by Superchic[k]en:
They're microsoft they really can't expect that much at a Macworld show can they?

Anyway I am tempted to buy word but ultimately I think I'll just stick with text edit and apple works. That said they really should revamp Appleworks or intigrate things like word count, and a few other features from Appleworks into text edit. Because TextEdit if you use it actually had a LOT of features for basic use. They just need a formating pallet and a few other things. I think if apple showed off TextEdit with basic word functions like footnotes and a few other things for just straight good paper writing they'd have a hit. OR in all seriousness if apple wanted to make a HUGE hit with college students they would make a TextEdit capable of easy double spacing without putting in the number just .5 1 1.5 and 2 for spacing. And put in a Turabian or APA or MLA wizzard like thing. You know where it would automatically format it to whatever writing format you chose. Maybe even have a grammer check that was specific, you know informal paper you could use conjunctions formal paper it would point it out. That sorta thing.
And I don't think it would take so much time... but dang if I told the guys at College here that I had a program that made it so I never had to worry about Turabian I could have em all planning to buy Macs for their next computers. Esspecially all the guys in the Theology programs.

Features missing from Textedit that would need to be added to be on par with Word (and sell)

- Track changes
- header/footer/page numbers
- footnotes
- tables
- math equations
- drop caps
- mail merge
- envelopes/labels
- thesaraus
- more typographic controls
- page/section breaks
- table of contents/index
- etc. etc.

These are features that people actually *use*, take my word for it. Point being, Textedit is to a full-fledged word processor as a shoe is to a lollipop.

My 2 cents: Apple should not alienate Microsoft by competing with them in office programs (where MS makes a lot of their money). Like it or lump it, MS Office *is* the standard Office suite. People won't even consider that there is an alternative even if it is compatible. Terms like "Powerpoint" have actually become terms to describe a generic digital slide show.

If people think that they cannot use/obtain MS Office for the Mac, it will hurt Apple's bottom line greatly. Logic will not prevail here.

Sorry, just being realistic.

[workerbee]

Originally posted by besson3c:
My 2 cents: Apple should not alienate Microsoft by competing with them in office programs (where MS makes a lot of their money). Like it or lump it, MS Office *is* the standard Office suite.

True, true. Even more so because the MBU really does an excellent job: Office.X runs a lot better, faster and smoother on my Mac than many more recent applications (Macromedia of course spring to mind, or Adobe's Acrobat 6 Professional).
If Office was from anyone else but Microsoft, people would be dancing with joy for the nice UI details and the care shown, and the Office.X 2004 keynote presentation would have been a total triumph. I'm no friend of M$' business practices and world domination tendencies, but there are things that they do very well, if not better than anyone else.

[holygoat]

A couple of people have posted about how the Office apps are "robust". Anyone who's ever watched someone do a degree-level text in Word, with pictures, will giggle at this.

I've seen Word lose embedded pictures at random - on the same machine and same copy of Word. Suddenly, a red cross.

It's also practically impossible to reliably align figures.

On the features side, it's clear that Word has never really got beyond being a letter/2-page report application, despite its enormous feature set. Simple features for an academic writer (e.g. automatic section numbering, citations without having to use EndNote (sucks on X), floating figures, ToC, indexing, internal referencing that works) are frustratingly absent.

Still, this is largely a rant on behalf of all the students I know who do academic writing in Word; I use LyX (which happily edited my 373-page report with nary a murmur) with pleasure.

Apple have clearly decided to leave Microsoft alone on the Office front; it wouldn't make sense for them to lose the major requirement of business users. However, I would like to see a replacement for AppleWorks - it is, unfortunately, hard to see a balance between features and annoying MS.

[HOMBRESINIESTRO]

Originally posted by besson3c:

These are features that people actually *use*, take my word for it. Point being, Textedit is to a full-fledged word processor as a shoe is to a lollipop.

What about Mellel. Except for importing Word documents correctly, it seems to be a full featured Word processor at a low price and nice looking, too!

[besson3c]

Originally posted by HOMBRESINIESTRO:
What about Mellel. Except for importing Word documents correctly, it seems to be a full featured Word processor at a low price and nice looking, too!

I'm not saying that there aren't viable word processors that can be used in replacement of Word, I'm just saying that people don't care. The world revolves around Word, unfortunately.