Microsoft announced on its Mac Mojo (ugh, terrible name!) blog yesterday that it is hard at work on the first service release for Office 2008, and that they will release it on March 11th.
This is only two months after they released Office 2008. Despite their claims that they have done this in response to ‘customer feedback’, it is hard to escape the thought that in fact it wasn’t really finished in January and they shipped it anyway. And the January release was in itself massively late.
This suggestion is backed up by the pretty poor experiences many of us have had with Office 2008. There are some pretty major security issues with the way the installer operates, that have been well publicised, and Tim blogged on here just a few days ago about the poor stability of Word 2008. I also encountered document-destroying crashes in Word, and performance on my 1.6Ghz G4 was so bad that I could generally out-type myself by four or five words at a time! I have had to go back to Office 2004 for now.
I have talked in the past of my perception of the poor resourcing at the Mac BU within Microsoft, and this also reinforces that view. In addition, the Mac BU stated that their entire release schedule will be pushed back by the need to fix Office 2008 – including the release of that all important OpenXML converter for Office 2004, that will allow Office 2004 to read and write the latest Microsoft Office file formats. They will now not release that until the end of June – 19 MONTHS after the release of these new formats with Office 2007 for Windows!
This really is a pretty poor situation. We have a buggy new release, and that in itself is bad enough, but support for the older version is also badly affected by the impacts of those bugs? And this from the biggest software company on the planet?
Go to http://www.officeformac.com/blog/ for the latest, happy-clappy positive spin on this shoddy situation.
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