*1*
Tim McDonough says, "We were the first large developer to release an OS X product..."

This is simply untrue, unless you don't count Adobe and Macromedia as "large developers".

Macromedia shipped FreeHand 10 in APRIL 2001, a full six months before Office v. X shipped.

http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia/proom/pr/2001/fh10.html

And Adobe's Illustrator 10 shipped in Nov 2001, at the same time Office v. X shipped.

http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/200111/20010511ai10ships.html

*2*
Tim says, "[we] are the only major developer not to hedge our bets--we released our latest versions only for OS X."

I have no idea why Microsoft's MacBU is so proud to have a product that ONLY runs under OS X. There is no problem with providing people with a version that runs BOTH under OS 9 and OS X. Adobe does it for all its major products. This means that people can upgrade whenever they are ready, and still benefit from the same new features. Instead, Microsoft chooses to completely abandon OS 9 users immediately.

I suspect the only real reason why Microsoft made Office v. X for OS X only is because it contains SO FEW NEW FEATURES compared to Office 2001 that there no way that they could have justified charging Office 2001 users for the upgrade otherwise.

The main issue is that Office v. X should NEVER have been a paying upgrade. NO OTHER "major developer" has released a new version of their product that does not combine OS X compatibility with a significant number of new features -- which at least partly justifies charging for the upgrade. Developers like Bare Bones Software even released a FREE update of their flagship product (BBEdit 6.1) that ran natively under OS X for users of BBEdit 6.1 for Mac OS 9. And subsequent paying upgrades (BBEdit 6.5) added new features -- for both the OS 9 and the OS X version.

There is absolutely no justifiable reason to charge so much money just for the privilege of being able to run Office natively under OS X. The MacBU says it is because the conversion involved "millions of lines of code" and was an enormous task. But this is not the end user's problem. The fact that Office is enormous is NOT something that Mac users ever asked for. They never asked for all these unnecessary and badly designed features that Microsoft kept adding to Office over the years. And Office is so badly designed from the end user's point of view that there is every reason to suspect that the apps are also badly written from a developer's point of view, thus adding to the enormity of the conversion task. But this, again, is not the end user's problem. It's not the end user's fault if the product is big, clumsy, bulky, and difficult to convert to OS X.

The end result is that, because MacBU devoted so much effort to porting to OS X all kinds of features that people don't need and don't use anyway, they didn't have enough time to optimize Word X's performance, and the application is so sluggish under OS X that it is barely usable:

http://groups.google.com/groups?q=Word+stalls+group:microsoft.public.mac.office.word&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=c274558d.0207170413.21bcaa8b%40posting.google.com&rnum=1

Even Word 2001 under Classic performs better than Word X under OS X, with the same set of features!

THAT'S a very reasonable explanation of why many Office 2001 users haven't upgraded yet. And it has nothing to do with Apple's alleged lack of promotional push for OS X.

*3*
Tim says, "we just released a Palm conduit and Palm desktop client for Mac, as well as a new version of Internet Explorer".

The Palm conduit was quickly pulled because it was so buggy and led to database corruption!

The "new version" of Explorer has absolutely no new features except for Quartz Text Smoothing capabilities, which can be enabled with the freeware Silk anyway. The feature set of Explorer hasn't changed in YEARS. It is still plagued by well-documented bugs, such as browser window contents not displaying properly and requiring a work-around to "refresh" the window:

http://www.macintouch.com/msie5part7.html

This bug has been documented for months and still hasn't been fixed.

*4*
You said, "Tim also pointed out that the timing of Kevin Browne's comments was driven not by the imminence of MacWorld, but by analyst questions about the expiration of Microsoft's five year agreement with Apple, which ends a few days from now. That makes sense to me."

These questions were raised SEVERAL MONTHS ago. Waiting until MacWord Expo to address them doesn't make sense to me.

*5*
You said, "Tim made clear that Microsoft really does have concerns about the slowness with which the hard core OS 9 users are embracing OS X--but he agreed with me that the pace appears to be picking up. He was fascinated by my account of how many copies of Mac OS X: The Missing Manual we've sold. (The "attach rate" of books to software is normally pretty low--1% is great--while we appear to have sold to a fairly large majority of OS X users, by his count. "You've got all of them!" he said.)"

In my opinion, MacBU people have no idea what they are talking about. They have figures that are ridiculously low and are in direct contradiction with what Apple says. As well, your own data appears to suggest a strong discrepancy between the objective rate of adoption and what MS says.

It is quite possible, as far as I can see, that many Mac users have moved to OS X but are still using Office 2001 under Classic, because of all the problems mentioned here above. Did Microsoft do any research in that area?

In conclusion, the MacBU might feel that they are strong supporters of OS X, but many of their actions demonstrate an utter lack of understanding of what Mac users want. Mac users want:

1) acceptable performance
2) new features that justify the upgrade price
3) quick bug fixes for the most glaring bugs

MS provides none of this at this point. They seem utterly incapable of self-criticism. It is always someone else's fault -- either Apple's or the end user's.

And, indeed, their only PR strategy is, as you indicated, FUD.

Keep up the good work.

Pierre Igot

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LATEXT - Littérature et graphisme / Literature and Visuals: http://www.latext.com
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