Is Microsoft Office 2008 Too Little, Too Late?
October 1st, 2007On or about January 15, 2008, according to current plan, Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit will release the long-awaited — and somewhat delayed — Office 2008 for the Mac in the U.S. They are busy touting its new features, which include updated artwork, a page layout feature for Word, and various and sundry tools for easier organization and access.
The suite, which dominates the Mac market, though not nearly as much as Office for Windows dominates that platform, is a huge profit center for Microsoft. Compared to the grief they suffer with their own operating system, Microsoft’s Mac software requires far less technical support. For most people, it just works, even if the software is flaky and typically bloated.
I have little doubt that Office 2008 will be a marvelous upgrade, well worth the purchase price, even if you’re buying your copy from scratch and don’t have an older version at hand. I’m personally a fan of Entourage, the email and contact management application, although the current version is slow, even on the speediest Power Mac on the planet, the G5 Quad. On an Intel-based Mac, despite ongoing improvements in Rosetta emulation, Entourage can be a real drag — and you can interpret that phrase any way you like.
