Future of Office for Mac

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Hi Phillip:

platforms for example the PDFMaker added by adobe that allows you to
create PDF's. In the PC version all web-links, and mailto: and such are
appropriately color coated, and are live when PDFMaker is used to create
a PDF. In the Mac version you can still create a PDF but all of the
links are de-colored, and You have to add them. Adobe says That certain
hooks in the PC version to allow this are not in the mac version, on
purpose.

Things like that stuff within the PC version that are deliberately
left. As Mac users we feel like "Second Class" citizens.

Well, yes, it was left out on purpose. But the "purpose" was Adobe's.

Microsoft announced five years ago that VBA was to be killed off. On BOTH
platforms.

They did this after much internal pain and soul-searching. The reason is
that, BY DESIGN, VBA cannot be properly secured. On Any platform. So it
had to go. It was a great idea (which is why it instantly became so
popular). But AppleScript did it better.

AppleScript you CAN secure. So Microsoft went with AppleScript on the Mac,
and replaced VBA with .NET on the PC. (Dot-NET enables you to choose a wide
variety of source coding languages, including COBOL and, I suspect X-Code or
AppleScript will be offered by someone real soon now ...)

Had Adobe chosen to re-code their add-in in C-sharp, it would run on both
platforms and Save to PDF would have the same functions on Mac as it does on
Windows.

The PDFMaker.dot is not a large piece of code. And it's badly designed. It
creates all manner of problems on the PC (where it works), as well as on the
Mac (where it doesn't).

Cheers

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[Phillip M. Jones, CE.T.]

Sorry that you thought I was trying to be a Troll.

I was asking the questions and making the comments in all seriousness.

Unless Computers greatly improve voice recognition exponentially, and
memory becomes 100% fool proof. With Free guaranteed backup; I don't see
Keyboards , Word Pros, and even paper disappearing.
Even CD's and DVD's only stay valid for 100 years. If the technology
stays viable.

If we get to the point, If ever; of Star-Trek next Generation where you
have massive supper computers that there processors grow as they receive
knowledge, It will be a 1000 years if Mankind last that long before we
get there.

I don't share your rosy (is it really?) picture of things.

Voice recognition is terrible now. My mother car has one of those ONSTAR
systems, and the Voice recognition is terrible. It can't tell the
difference between my pronunciation of 4 (Four) and 0 (Zero, or ohhh.)

My mother is hearing impaired and has to use Close-captioning. The way
the voice recognizer mangles words would embarrass an 8 year old. The
voices created in The Mac OS system are great and even tweaking the
speed for an hour you can almost make some of them sound real. But, its
still Robot like.

It will be long after my death (and I am 57) before voice recognition
gets to the point it will be perfect and we can do away with pen/pencil
and paper, or Keyboards.

Hi Phillip:

Well, it's a wonderful troll that will undoubtedly increase the traffic on
this newsgroup for quite a while

Here's my completely uninformed two cents worth:

* There will be an alternative operating system to Windows still around in
50 years. In 50n years, Windows may *be* the alternative...

* Both the PC and the Mac will fit in your shirt pocket well before then.

* Keyboards will probably be little used, even if they don't disappear
entirely.

* The need for a word processor will go away, quite soon now.

* Text-handling ability will become so ubiquitous it will simply be
built-in to the front ends of the software that "use" the text. And that's
where the remnants of Microsoft Office will end up: as a set of callable
modules in something that looks suspiciously like your web browser.

* The contents of your shirt pocket will come in two flavours: beige with
square corners, and white with rounded corners. Both will have a heads-up
display, earphones, and cameras.

* And Microsoft will still be making software for both

Cheers

--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Phillip M. Jones, CET |LIFE MEMBER: VPEA ETA-I, NESDA, ISCET, Sterling
616 Liberty Street |Who's Who. PHONE:276-632-5045, FAX:276-632-0868
Martinsville Va 24112 |[email protected], ICQ11269732, AIM pjonescet
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[Phillip M. Jones, CE.T.]

Hi Phillip:

Go on, admit it... You love to stir us up



Well, I believe voice recognition is a LOT closer than that However,
you can't do it properly on a wimpy little 2GHz processor And some of
the algorithms around are not quite there yet, either.

I worked on this back in 1990, when Fujitsu was trying to get it going on a
giant LISP machine. Yeah: the results were truly embarrassing... But they
were trying to translate from English to or from Japanese while they were at
it.

Knowing the Japanese as I do, they have NOT stopped trying, and they will
get there as soon as we can throw enough computing power at the problem.

My "guess" is that it will take another order of magnitude of memory, and a
massively-parallel processor to do the job. Voice recognition is less about
highly-complex processing of one sound-wave at a time, and more about making
lots of small calculations on millions of concurrent possibilities.

The human brain is fairly "slow" as CPUs go -- it runs at about 20 to 80 Hz
(yeah, it's a speed-step processor...). But it has several billion parallel
processors Oh, and lotsa memory (except for mine...)

Given that your friendly local software company has not yet mastered the
challenge of getting Word to run on more than one processor at a time, we
may have to wait a year or two yet for parallelism on that sort of scale.


There is hope: Most of Sydney's taxis are now dispatched by voice
recognition. The majority of Australia's large court transcripts are
produced by voice recognition. But my phone still won't reliably dial my
friends using it


Well, I don't agree. You're only two years older than me, and I expect to
see it working properly before I retire

Cheers

I see your an eternal optimist

But; from what I've seen or been through, I am an eternal pessimist, or
more likely a Pragmatist. I don't see it happeing before my days are
over :-|

--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Phillip M. Jones, CET |LIFE MEMBER: VPEA ETA-I, NESDA, ISCET, Sterling
616 Liberty Street |Who's Who. PHONE:276-632-5045, FAX:276-632-0868
Martinsville Va 24112 |[email protected], ICQ11269732, AIM pjonescet
------------------------------------------------------------------------

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[Jim Gordon]

I want to thank Phillip and all who have participated in this worthy
thread. This is fun yet seriously insightful.

CDs and DVDs are not likely to be around in 100 years. "CDs and DVDs
don't have a shelf-life of more than 15 years at the outside."
http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/25514

Tape still has an edge over CDs and DVDs as an archive media in terms of
the ability to reliably play back over time (safely up to about 15
years). There really is not a good low-cost way to keep a digital
collection for long periods of time. Those circumstances coupled with
ever-changing digital formats and encryption schemes means that although
the technical problems of recording and distribution have been solved,
the problem of preservation remains unsolved.

My blue-tooth enabled cell phone has voice recognition so that I can
simply speak a name and the phone calls the desired person. It gets it
right about 50% of the time on the first attempt. Another 25% of the
time it takes 2 tries for each spoken name. 5% of the time it calls the
wrong name. The rest of the time it doesn't respond. Since the names are
single sounds isolated, I agree that voice recognition has a long way to
go. Also, when getting call distributors that ask me to speak... my
results have nearly a 100% failure rate at both voice recognition and
anticipating what I want to say.

As for player technologies I can only offer some observations without
any firm conclusions. Web browsers are players. The PowerPoint player is
a player. QuickTime is a player. Flash, RealPlayer, WMP, BlackBoard,
SCORM etc are all players. Businesses that can control their in-house
environment can freely choose which player to support. All others must
consider the mix of available players in the markets they wish to reach.
Content providers have to decide what is the best way to reach their
intended audience. The widest possible user base is not necessarily
plain text, despite the persistent stubbornness of PINE and LYNX users.
Right now the base line is HTML v4 IMHO. Anything you do beyond HTMLv4
is risking losing some audience. When IE had 92%+ market share then WMP
was a pretty safe bet. Now IE for windows is less than 75% market share.
Toss in another 15% Mac users and sticking with a single platform player
like WMP means an instant loss of about 40% of potential audience. Adobe
Flash is the closest thing to ubiquity right now, but QuickTime via the
back door of iTunes is also a contender. Right now WMP needs to always
be supplemented with at least one other player in order to reach at
least 80% of the market. As long as Microsoft makes IE and WMP
single-platform then mathematics will work against them and both will
continue to lose market share. If there is a single lesson to be learned
from Flash, QuickTime, and RealPlayer it is that they must be cross
platform in order to succeed.

Returning to the original topic of this thread - MacOffice looks like it
will be a better cross-platform player in the future. Please trust the
MVPs on this one. We're not allowed to "spill the beans." Indeed, the
beans are still growing and not ready for harvest yet. Read John's
comments about AppleScript and C-Sharp programming languages. Put that
information together with the idea that Mac Office will support the new
XML office formats, but with a user interface that will be different
from Office 2007's and you might get a feel for the future of Office. It
looks to me that Office for Mac in the future will be a better
cross-platform application, which ought to strengthen its position in
the market place.

-Jim Gordon
Mac MVP