Mr. McGimpsey, thanks for taking the time to reply in detail; perhaps I
struck a chord. You do make some valid points. Should you care to read my
comments, they're interspersed below.
Hmmm...I don't like it so much when posters start out their posts
building a disparaging straw man...
Hmmm...I don't like it when a MS MVP makes a needless, clearly
passive-aggressive comment to another user, a Microsoft customer. It should
not be the job of MS MVPs to legislate intelligence or comment on user
ignorance at a public message board that's designed to help, not hinder,
better use of the product.
MacBU is about 160 people, including secretaries and marketing folks.
They, like any other division, live and die by sales of their products.
It doesn't matter *what* the rest of the company does: if a division
doesn't make money, it doesn't get funded, unless there's a strategic
reason for MS to do so. You say yourself that the market share is small,
so why would you expect MS to invest huge resources in it? MS isn't a
benign charity, it's a profit making company which is responsible to its
shareholders to maximize their return on investment.
If MacBU no longer can justify the investment required, the business
will be sold or restructured, or closed, no matter how "endless" the
resources. IE is a perfect example - it was discontinued when it was no
longer able to drive sales of other products, and was no longer paid for
by Apple.
Largely, I agree. And from a marketing perspective, Mac BU touts itself as
producing great products with unique feature sets for the Mac. Fine; that's
what the marketers are supposed to do: Examine the market, define a
requirement, build a business plan, get it funded, and turn it over to
development. And, to your point, then, if there are so many issues still
outstanding with Entourage, perhaps the MS marketers, uh, missed the mark a
bit. The yearning for expanded support with the Exchange environment, user
interface issues and small features like more complete HTML support of email
are three glaring ones that fail to be fixed. Entourage is now in its
fourth major upgrade since it was announced in I think 1998. Perhaps the
marketers underestimated the number of folks that would actually buy Office,
and further, those that need seamless integration into Windows operating and
server environments. And, moreover, I have a hunch it underestimated the
sophistication level (i.e., expectation) of many (certainly not the
majority, though) of potential Office users.
Completely irrelevant. Development and marketing funding follow sales
projections. MS doesn't have a pot of cash sitting around that anyone
and their brother can dip into. Like any other public for-profit
company, MS is responsible to its shareholders for efficiently
reinvesting its profits into development. And if it projects that it can
expect to sell $X worth of Mac product, you can be sure that the
development money available to MacBU will be some fraction of $X.
My point here was simple; there has evidently been a choice not to add
additional "strategic" marketing dollars to the Mac BU. Were that not the
case, many of the small, irritating anomalies present in Entourage would
have gone away a long time ago. I don't think there's any question that
Microsoft, at various points in time, has dumped money into product
development that went nowhere - or for which sales were not as expected, yet
those products were, for "strategic" reasons, not pulled from the product
lineups as soon as they should have been.
VPC isn't unique to the Mac platform. AFAIK, sales of WinVPC exceed
sales of MacVPC.
I stand (actually sit) corrected. I didn't even know Microsoft released a
product to run multiple operating systems on a single PC.
I'm not an MS marketing guy, so I obviously don't know much about the market
for multiple OS support on a single PC -- but this tells me that the 3rd
party development community is still somewhat fractured and cannot keep up
with various iterations of Windows, so Microsoft has come to the rescue by
making it easier for customers running software that is compatible only with
a particular version of Windows while the "rest" of their PC has been
designed for Windows (XP). I have to add that on this front, Apple made a
better decision vis-à-vis OS X, and after a few years of getting used to it,
I know of only a handful of people that haven't switched. Sure, their
decision was easier, since the market share was considerably smaller and the
number of machines to switch was less daunting. But they'd done it quite
well, I think.
Aside from the business community, I can't see WinVPC selling well into the
personal user environment. But no matter; it simply illustrates my point
even further. There isn't a single product that has been produced solely
for the Apple market. Maybe I'll all wet on the following assumption, but
it seems to me the market for Office on the Mac is larger than the market
for Flight Simulator on the PC.
From a business perspective, what excuses would be valid?
Good point. The only one I can think of is that the anticipated ROI can, as
you mentioned, only justify a certain amount of investment. And, naturally,
the Mac BU has to pick and choose which features/functionality it will
implement given schedules, sales projections, etc.
However, this implies to me that Microsoft has neither interest in greatly
expanded Macintosh support, nor does it then want to make the business case
to produce *overwhelmingly* good, stable, well-integrated software for the
Mac, at least in the medium term. I'm not criticizing it negatively for
doing so, but so it seems anyway. It seems to me that if MS really wanted
more Office share of the Mac market, it would throw considerably more
marketing dollars at it. Again, my guess is that MS has done this over the
years for several, if not many, products for which the initial business case
might not have been all that robust; that such is NOT being done for the Mac
is, to me anyway, telling.
Your arguments are somewhat contradictory. If the Entourage market is so
small, why would MS be worried about its implications for Outlook?
Wouldn't it make more sense to use Entourage as a prototyping platform,
a testbed of ideas for Outlook? Mac XL has had charting features that
run rings around WinXL for years - I don't think the WinXL dev team
loses any sleep over it.
Yes, they admittedly are a bit. Normally I write these things and sit on
them for a day or so and re-read them later because I know that someone out
there will tear them apart...in this case I didn't, and I'm busted. At some
level I admit introducing an emotional play on my post. I'm in many ways a
frustrated Entourage user like many others who post here. Sort of the, "Why
can't it just work like they *say* or *sell* it to work, or like the average
user would expect it to work?!"
One problem is that Outlook isn't Entourage's "sister" - they're at
best distant cousins, with a different code base and entirely different
dev teams.
From an MS perspective, what does it matter if an Entourage feature
outshines Outlook? Are you saying that they're worried that someone's
going to say "gee, look at that great feature in Entourage...that's so
much better than Outlook that I'm going to switch to Macs - and use
Apple Mail!"?? Doesn't make sense to me.
There's no incentive for MacBU to cripple Entourage for the sake of
Outlook. To do so cuts their own throat - if Entourage, along with the
rest of the Office suite, isn't compelling enough for Mac owners to
purchase, their jobs are forfeit, just like anyone else in business.
They have a powerful incentive to make all their software the best they
can within the constraints of their market.
Agreed. It's the definition of "their market" that concerns me. Were I
heading up the Mac BU, I'd probably be one very frustrated manager.
I also have a hard time seeing how MS loses if Entourage becomes
compelling enough to convert Windows users to Mac users. They'll still
get their tribute in sales of MacOffice, at a necessarily higher profit
margin than WinOffice. Where they *should* be concerned is in making
sure that switchers don't go to a non-MS Office solution.
Again, agreed. And if that's the case, and to my earlier point, why then
doesn't MS make a bigger play for more of the Mac user base? Is there
something pedestrian about the general skill set of Mac buyers that
Microsoft deems not worth going after or something? IOW, not enough Mac
buyers will be convinced to use Office regardless of how enticing we make
it, how many great features we include?
I generally detest the Windows side of MS as much as the next Mac user,
but I'm also a businessman, and I can understand and appreciate MS's
investment strategy. Sure, I'd think that BG (or rather SB) throwing a
billion or so MacBU's way would be terrific, but I don't expect MS to do
things any differently than any other company. And were I a shareholder,
I'd be jumping up and down about management malfeasance as fast as any
Wintel user.
Fine, but again, what you're saying to me here is that no one at MS,
including those in the Mac BU, are in this to do anything more than tread
water, their sales goals strategically set to keep a finger in the Mac
market but not really to grow it robustly -- like MS endeavors to do with
practically everything else it touches.
If that's true, then that's the business decision that I have little respect
for. And, indeed, were Apple to decide, as it has done in the past, that
its third-party relationships aren't delivering the kinds of products that
its customers want and will buy, then it does so itself. Aside from Xserve,
we haven't seen that much from Apple yet.
But I would offer this: If the next major upgrade to Entourage doesn't
satisfactorily address many, if not most, of the myriad issues addressed on
this and other sites, and should Apple meanwhile decide that it needs an
industrial strength version of Mail because it knows that a potentially
profitable sector of its user base would buy it, so probably would I. On
balance, I do like Entourage, but I'm not above trying something else if I
as a customer get the feeling that my needs aren't being met.
And maybe therein lies one of my flaws: I still like Entourage better than
Apple Mail, and maybe that's exactly what Microsoft wants to hear.
I'm not unhappy with Excel, PowerPoint or Word (though they, too, have their
own bizarre idiosyncrasies compared to their Windows brethren) -- a bit
ironic considering that all of them were launched on the Mac. And I do
appreciate that software development must rest on a solid business case.
The definition of "solid," however, sometimes has less to do with hard core,
provable numbers than it does *assumptions* based on strategically-desirable
future outcomes, be they because the company wants to buy market share,
steal it, create it, or otherwise.
IMO, somewhere inbetween those two does IMO lie the Microsoft Mac BU.
OTOH, conspiracy theories *are* fun, and a lot more entertaining to
indulge in than the mundane reality of operating a business.
Agreed. Particularly when a kernel of truth might pop out of one of them
now and then.
I'm just