One day soon, employees at Apple Computer Inc. will be loading something new on their Macintosh computers: Microsoft Office 98.
The software suite includes new Macintosh versions of Microsoft’s word processor, spreadsheet, presentation-graphics and e-mail programs. And if early looks at Office 98 for the Mac aren’t deceiving, those programs will boast something unprecedented. For the first time in years, if ever, they won’t be significantly behind their Windows counterparts.
People who hate everything about Microsoft will find reasons to fret at this turn of events. I think they should lighten up, at least this once. Office 98 for Macintosh won’t be sheer perfection, but on balance you have to call it a happy event for the Mac community.
It all would have been unthinkable a year ago. Microsoft was clearly losing interest in the Mac as its Windows-everywhere strategy looked more and more successful and its investment in Mac software paid back less and less.
But that was before Apple and Microsoft cut a deal that infuriated some Mac partisans. Microsoft bought $150 million of Apple stock, a token investment in the big scheme of things, and agreed to bring its Mac version of Office into rough alignment with the Windows version. Microsoft also paid Apple–the amount hasn’t been publicly disclosed but is rumored to be about $100 million–as part of an arrangement to cross-license some technology.
The deal was better for Microsoft than Apple, though it helped both companies. The Mac became a little less risky for some customers. Current legal jousting aside, Microsoft bought itself some small measure of antitrust protection as it helped prop up a supposedly competing operating-system platform.
When Steve Jobs, then as now the man pulling the strings at Apple, announced the deal last August at the Boston MacWorld show, some in his audience booed. Microsoft’s Bill Gates, talking by satellite, loomed above the stage–and Jobs–on a huge television screen.
The week before last, at MacWorld in San Francisco, another Microsoft executive brought Microsoft’s message to the stage, live and in person: Ben Waldman, general manager of Microsoft’s Macintosh business unit.
Waldman made, for Microsoft, a startling admission. Referring to his company’s most recent versions of Office for the Mac, he said, “Sometimes we may be wrong–we admit that at Microsoft now.”
What Microsoft did wrong with the old Office was fairly simple, actually. It tried to foist off on the Mac community an ersatz, Windows-like product that didn’t look like Mac software, didn’t act like Mac software and, crucially, didn’t feel like Mac software.
The new version doesn’t contain all the programs in the Windows version, and it’s not cheap. But it has a few modestly advanced features you won’t find in its bigger brother.
The most striking thing about Office 98 is that it’s genuine Mac software. This time, Waldman said, Microsoft conformed to the Mac way of doing things. Buttons are where they’re supposed to be on a Mac; mouse actions work the way they should on a Mac.
Whatever the motives of their corporate chiefs, Waldman and his colleagues deserve a lot of credit for the way they approached the new version. They listened to Mac users, and worked hard to do what the users wanted.
Good for them. Good for the Mac.