My Macinations

Microsoft has got the Mac community and the Mac press hoodwinked. Again!

Yesterday, while announcing Office:mac 2008 SP1, Microsoft announced that they’re bringing back VBA functionality (Visual Basic Automation/Scripting) to the Mac version of their Office suite in its next major upgrade. Microsoft mentioned that they’re comfortable with an upgrade cycle of 3 – 3.5 years. Mac Office 2008 came out at the start of 2008. So the next version should be expected around the start or in the summer of 2011.

After this announcement, various Mac sites and blogs expressed elation and happiness at this fortunate turn of events. The mighty Microsoft has smiled upon us and made a grand gesture towards the poor, poor users of the Mac. Microsoft loves us!

What a bunch of bullsh*t!

There is nothing particularly good about this. This is nothing more than the next step in Microsoft’s effort to keep the Mac as a second class citizen and to keep people from finding real alternatives.

Let’s review.

The Mac version of Microsoft Office has always been hobbled by the lack of feature parity with the Windows version. This is done on purpose to sideline the Mac as much as possible.

First Microsoft never ported its Access database to the Mac. In the 90s, that missing piece was a great reason for businesses to discount the Mac as a possible business platform.

Next, when collaboration in business became more important, Microsoft yanked its Outlook client and replaced it with an inferior sibling: Entourage. Up till Office 2008, Entourage couldn’t really be used as a full Exchange client. There is no technical reason for that. Microsoft owns and defines the Exchange protocols, if they wanted, they could have implemented the functionality in Entourage, or even simpler, kept the same Outlook client. Why didn’t they?

When Apple started working on an Exchange alternative with its open source iCal server, Microsoft moved to give Mac users a much better Exchange compatibility. With this better compatibility, businesses don’t need to start considering an Exchange alternative (despite its high cost). But to keep the Mac at a disadvantage, Microsoft took away VB scripting completely. Their excuse was that porting this functionality to Intel Macs would have delayed the suite by another year.

When asked about VBA a couple of months ago, Microsoft said that it’s not a big deal since they’re removing it from Office for Windows in the next version too and replacing it completely (with something based on their .Net technology). Now they seem to have changed their tune. Or if they haven’t changed courses, to me it means that the next major functionality in Office Windows would be this new scripting capability, which the Mac version would lack and be stuck with VBA.

So for now, anybody needing VBA compatibility can’t use the current Mac version of Office. If business users insisted on moving to the Mac, but had no choice in using VBA in Office, then they would have to spring for a full license of Windows and Office for Windows and use them in a VM like Parallels or Fusion. It’s a win-win for Microsoft.

The sad part is that Microsoft has been able to blind Mac users and the Mac press easily from this strategy by offering them unique —non-critical— features in Office for Mac. Misdirection at its finest.

And now, Microsoft announced that VBA is slated for a grand comeback in the next major upgrade. Why?

One point to address: Many journalists over the years expressed real concern that Microsoft would kill the Mac version of Office for various reasons. Reasons ranged from wanting to punish Apple to wanting to kill the Mac, to the Mac market being not worth it. I don’t think Microsoft had the intention of killing the Mac version of Office ever, unless the Mac died first on its own.

Why wouldn’t Microsoft kill the Mac version you ask? It’s simple, it’s keeping it around first to make a ton of money, and second to make sure that nobody else creates a viable alternative.

Microsoft has been smarter than Adobe in this regard. Witness the Final Cut issue. In the late 90s, while Apple was trying to transition to Mac OS X, Adobe announced that they’re discontinuing support for the Mac in their video editing program Premier and rebuffed Apple’s requests/pleas to keep supporting the Mac in Premier. That move cost them dearly. It forced Apple to acquire and develop its own video editing package. With Final Cut, Apple managed to pull a large (majority?) chunk of the video editing market from Adobe’s control.

Same thing with Microsoft and Office. If Microsoft pulls the Mac version, it would leave a huge vacuum in its place. Vacuums are not desirable. Wherever there is a vacuum, somebody is bound to fill it. Whether Apple itself or some other 3rd party developer; either way somebody would. The Mac office suite vacuum would be filled within a year and not longer.

A strong office suite in the Mac space is a double threat to Microsoft. Anybody with a profitable package on the Mac can easily port it to Windows and compete with Microsoft. So Microsoft would lose its own Office:mac income and would risk to lose a bit of its Office:windows income to this potential competitor from the Mac world. Microsoft would never let that happen.

That brings us back to yesterdays announcement of VBA’s comeback in the next major upgrade of Office for the Mac. In my view it’s not a good thing in general for Mac users.

It’s simply Microsoft’s way of keeping the competition away. Microsoft has always had a strategical policy of selling the future, either to kill the market for possible competitors, or to move the focus from current product deficiency to an ideal hypothetical future product. Who would invest in developing a Mac program, let alone a whole suite, if they know or even think that Microsoft is working on the same thing?

If you read the online forums since Office 2008 came out, you’d see that there is a great restlessness in the Mac community over this lack of VBA and a subtle move towards OpenOffice.org. This move is starting to gain traction especially that, now, OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta has support for the Mac’s Aqua interface and doesn’t rely on X Windows anymore. OpenOffice.org has a great chance to gain big market share within Mac users in the next few years due to this critical functionality.

So what do you think:

1. Is Microsoft’s move to bring VBA back to the Mac version of Office genuine?
2. Is it because Microsoft listens to its users or to simply protect their market?
3. Do you believe that the Mac version of Office would ever have feature parity with MS Office for Windows?
4. Considering the intense onslaught of competitors in the office suite field on Microsoft, can they risk hobbling their own software to erect an artificial barrier for Macs in business?

Today, Microsoft released a new version of their music player the Zune
and again, they failed to offer something more than ‘good enough’.

In a market almost completely dominated by Apple’s iPod, their offering look like they could compete with last year’s iPods; that’s not good enough to compete with this year’s iPods.

They have a couple of features that iPods don’t have, like an FM radio tuner and wireless syncing, but nothing really compelling.

If the new Zunes existed in a world of their own, then they could be seen as excellent. However, they don’t and they aren’t. The Zunes are Microsoft’s answer to their own pathological need to enter and try to dominate every market that has any kind of software in it.

What they got right:

The new Zunes look sleeker than their predecessors
However, this is just a visual assessment. Last year’s Zunes looked good in pictures. But, about a month ago, I had the chance to hold one in my hand and my reaction ‘Wow, what a piece of crap’. It feels extremely clunky, especially when you compare it to the same year’s iPods. So, I’ll withhold further judgement on that one until I can hold one of these new ones in my hand.

Wireless syncing
It is nice to be able to sync your music player to your computer’s music library without having to connect it with a cable. Although, since you have to charge it usually, connecting it isn’t a big hassle. So this is nice to have, but not a big seller feature.

FM Tuner
Nice to have sometime. Again, not the most compelling feature for a ‘Personal Music Player’. The biggest draw of all digital music players is that they allow you to listen to whatever you want, whenever you want. Having somebody else make a playlist for you and interrupt it with talking and commercials is not exactly what most people want. But, it’s nice to have if you like talk radio from time to time.

What they got wrong:

Nothing compelling
While this not exactly something wrong, it’s still a drawback. There is nothing about the new Zunes that makes you go ‘Ooh, I must have that’.

Still no Mac support
If Microsoft wants to be taken seriously and give the impression that they’re not just trying to extend their Windows monopoly, then they need to start supporting other platforms. Like it or not, Mac users tend to be influencers. If Microsoft can’t seem to get itself to appeal to those who have a greater influence in the consumer electronics market, then they show that they don’t understand the market they’re trying to dominate.

Lame marketing
They announced this new version of their music player. But, it’s not available immediately (big mistake when they’re competing against Apple).

Their website is completely lame (I mean really, how hard is it to make a picture clickable? a tiny ‘learn more’ link is not enough).

The Zune’s site is a joke. For a company as big as Microsoft, you would think they could have hired an advertising company to design their promotional pages on the site. If you want to have a big share of a consumer electronics market, you have to get people excited about your products. Microsoft doesn’t give the impression that even they are excited about their own stuff. That impression carries to their audience.

The impression that I got from their site and from what I’ve read today in the media goes something like ‘Yeah, here is our new version of the Zune, we know it’s not as good as the new iPods, but we have to release something’.

Colors
The black one and the red one are OK, but the green and pink! ugh! those look like ugly toys. Got to have attractive colors.

That’s all I can think of without being able to see and hold one in person.

I’m a Mac user, and an iPod owner. I’m only disappointed in Microsoft because I believe that Apple is getting complacent. Currently, Apple doesn’t have any serious competition in the digital music players field. They’re not as innovative as they can be. Actually, that’s not the correct word. They are innovative, look at the iPod Touch. The more appropriate word is not ‘aggressive’ enough.

The iPod classic is basically the same as last year’s with bigger drives. No real innovation beyond a new metallic outer shell. Why there is no Touch with a big hard drive? If anybody is serious about watching video on an iPod, then the Touch has the largest screen, and consequently would need larger storage for the big video files. And why is there no Mail application on the Touch?

Only with healthy competition, can a healthy market exist. So far, nobody has put up any serious competition to Apple in the music player business.

To paraphrase Paul Giamatti’s character in ‘Shoot’em Up’, “Either Apple is really that good, or its competition really, really sucks”. From Microsoft’s recent offerings, it’s a bit of both.