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The Bill and Steve Show

So last night was the Bill & Steve confab at the All Things Digital conference. It was a pretty mellow discussion as they go (although apparently contrary to popular opinion, BillG is not Fake Steve!)
Both Bill and Steve made some nice comments about the MacBU. Check out this link from roughly 2:35 to 3:05.
I’ve talked about the relationship that the MacBU has with Apple developers before, and it’s nice to hear Steve himself say that “it’s one of our best developer relationships.”

2 replies on “The Bill and Steve Show”

Another version of Office, another exercise in frustration.
It’s bad enough that through the years various versions of Word have had major issues with respect to uploading files created in previous versions. As we’ve had revised Word file format after revised Word file format….
It’s bad enough that Word’s “save as html” approach creates the most bloated code since the invention of a personal computer. Try comparing version of WordPerfect’s “save as html” with Word’s (and no, I don’t use WP any more myself, but a workmate did, and his web pages created that way were quite tightly coded — no repairs with dreamweaver required).
It’s bad enough that MS has subjected everyone to the same crappy icons in its toolbars for over a decade (oh, wait, now we get…ribbons!).
It’s bad enough that Office help screens become progressively slower and slower with each new version. And that they make trying to find appropriate information so absurdly difficult (geez, which term did the folks at MS use this time?).
At least we sort of had macros that could be used on PCs *and* Macs. Usually.
Now even that disappears. Techno-babble aside, this is a stupid move. I’ve endured updates to Office year after year, each update generally offering less and less in terms of anything new or useful, and each update making it progressively harder to turn off or deactivate crap. (No, thanks, I don’t need idiotic animated help avatars, or the great reconfiguring and invisible menu schemes.)
Guess it’s time to really give Apple’s Pages a workout, and to start using Open Office for a month-long test.
For all the brain-power MS employs, you’d think folks there would have some brighter light bulbs working. Come on, the best you can offer is more incompatibility with previous versions of Word — and a stripping away of one of the few cross-platform features that usually works?

Hi there, sorry to abuse your blog with this, but you are the only one on the OSX Office team who I had addressed the issue publicly.
As you and the rest of the team fix and polish the 2008 release, please, I am begging you in italics no less: please, make your application installer and updates in package format, the installerVise product, makes updating the product in a managed environment a real chore. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.
Feel free to email me back and berate my idiocy.
Cheers,
Esmaeil

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