I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
I’ve been running the beta’s of Mac Office for the past few months and was delighted when a box with the fully released Microsoft Office:mac 2008 with Microsoft Expression Media arrived on my desk on Monday night.
It’s amazing how long the release cycles are now is for Office. This version replaces Office 2004 for Mac, so it’s been a long time coming. This version is developed to exploit the new Intel chips in Mac’s so we’ve really been waiting for a year.
For me the incremental updates to desktop productivity tools isn’t as exciting as it used to be. Word and Excel are great products but they haven’t fundamentally changed in many years.
In the words of the Spice Girls, what I really, really, want is collaborative editing tools.
For me documents have 5 mins to maybe 24 hours of intensive activity - then they seldom change. In that intensive period of activity you are working over someones shoulder, emailing versions, revise, tweak, revise, tracking changes, waiting for another edit, revise etc, etc.
In these days of Software + Services and with the power of the modern computer Word should be a collaborative writing and editing surface where 1-10 people can be actively working on the same document, at the same time anywhere in the world.
Even 10 people continuously typing can only generate a tiny amount of data. A 1200 baud modem could keep up with that small amount of changes. Normally it’s type, pause, think, type. Maybe 30 words a minute.
How useful would it be to have a few people working on budgets in Excel in real-time?
Yes you can start to do sharing with Google Apps, but with the power of the installed productivity tools we should by now have rich, real-time collaboration.
So I think there still huge potential in desktop productivity software, but we need some real innovation here, not just another incremental update of the same disconnected model.
However, in terms of an incremental update, Office:mac 2008 is a nice bit of software. It has some of the best bits of Office 2007 but somehow seems simpler and cleaner. Entourage is nicer and even though it is mainly just better lipstick it is much, much nicer to use.
There are some weird Mac only bits like MyDay and the Project Center but I’ve found I just turn these off and try to keep things clean.
If you’re a corporate Mac user, Office:mac 2008 is a no brainer and I recommend the upgrade. We run a mixture of Mac’s and PC’s and they play together nicely. I’ve enjoyed my last year on OSX and find a Mac with Microsoft Office is the most productive way for me to work.
The Microsoft Mac Business Unit has done a great job. But my advice to the Office product managers is that the existing model of desktop productivity software is end of life. There is only marginal incremental value to add. Software + Services and using the power of the client for sophisticated real-time collaboration is where this product category has to go.
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Probably falling under the software category of “weird mac only bits”, it sounds like SubEthaEdit is likely what you’d like when it comes to collaboration:
http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/
Realtime multi-user editing of one document. A version of this for the PC would be great and they do license the core editing engine (other mac products like Coda use it) but I don’t think it’s been licensed for anyone to convert/use on a PC.
Perhaps there is some opportunity in that.
- JD
I completely agree with this post. We use Google Docs for this very reason - everyone can contribute to and review documents. It works for us because we don’t have a need for all the complex features and tools of the Microsoft products.
One option is to use Workspace (workspace.officelive.com).
Free, still in beta, but good.
Also there’s SharedView for “live” sharing, but not sure if that will work on a Mac. Also free and still in beta.
For the full suite of sharing and automatic sync, there’s Groove which you can purchase to go with Office, although again not for Mac.
What is the best way to go
if you need Microsoft Office..
mainly Excel & Word
on 3 to 6 macs?
thank you,
Mickey
Perhaps this idea will only be fully realised when the applications themselves move off of the desktop into “cloud computing” land. This kind of architecture almost forces the issue of real-time multiuse of documents and applications. At least for B-to-B, we see this becoming real within 3 years or so. Look at Amazon S3 or one of the other cloud computing/storage companies for a preview…
[...] the Office platform for powerful Software + Services model. Collaborative Office has to be the [...]