Apple Thoughts: Microsoft Working on Office 2009

"Office 2008 included many new painstakingly crafted features, more than are easy to list - a year after launch a few that I'm still commonly pointing out to people because I know they'll get hooked on them are Publishing Layout View, SmartArt, and Ledger Sheets. Since Office 2008 launched in January, we've been highly focused on developing and releasing continuous updates, with a focus on monitoring and improving the stability and performance of the product. Just in our Office 12.1.2 update for example, Word's launch time improved by as much as 30% and Excel's calculation performance by as much as 50% (some calc-heavy test cases saw even more improvement - the result of floating point math optimizations.)"

It's hard to argue that Office 2008 didn't suck less than Office 2004, but there are still things it does seriously poorly (for example, why do Pivot Tables still suck and why is there still no ODBC drivers for MS Jet (Access) and MS SQL included with the suite?). Sucking less probably wasn't their goal. In fact, I don't use Office on the Mac all that much anymore except when I need Excel. For word processing, I still use Pages, and for presentations I use Keynote and that's due in no small part to Microsoft's insistence on making an inferior version of Office for the Mac available in an effort to keep people on the Windows Platform. Here's a tip to the team: Make 2009 not only suck less, but make it better.