But featurism or not, it has become-for better or worse-the de facto standard. Now I understand that some would suggest that MS Office suffers from rampant featurism and therefore cannot be the yardstick for measuring all other contenders. None of the document review features work, none of the styles are the same (or function the same), etc. Yes, I can open some Microsoft Office formatted documents in iWork, but then I can’t really do anything much more than perform basic editing functions. But they provide none of the advanced features that make collaborating on digital documents somewhat do-able. The oftentimes militant public support that Mac people will profess for these applications can only be explained by a certain lack of familiarity of how work in an office-any modern office that’s not a design studio or one-person consulting firm-actually gets done. iWork-though Mac people swear by it-felt a little like “Office for children” (can’t really say it any other way).
Not that anything else replaced it, at least not any native OS X applications. And while it was occasionally handy to use Word or Excel natively on the Mac (when it was too tedious to fire up the VM), Office 2008 basically just took up space in the netherworld of software-installed-but-not-committed-to. It wasn’t even particularly good as a POP3/IMAP email client. The main applications worked okay but were nothing spectacular and Entourage was simply a terrible excuse for an Outlook replacement.
I obtained and installed Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, but-truth be told-it was about on par with Office 2003 for Windows. Realistically, the MacBook was fast enough to handle this with aplomb, and it was kind of practical in a variety of ways (for example, I could ‘switch off’ my work life at the end of the day). And my work life happened inside a Windows 7 Professional virtual machine in Parallels.
As previously told, OS X really sold me with its elegance and stability, and even though I tried running my MacBook with just Windows for a while, I found the driver support to be lacking in sophistication (Apple’s hardware driver support for Windows, while there, isn’t designed to run the pretty hardware at its best).įor the first year or so after buying my Mac, I opted for a ‘dual life.’ My web life-blogging, surfing, personal email, banking, Twitter, Facebook, etc.-took place on the Mac. My work is for a software consulting firm that works in the Microsoft space, so compatibility with my coworkers-and appearances in front of clients-was a significant factor. As I blogged at the time, I was originally attracted to the beautiful and affordable hardware but couldn’t conceive of a scenario where I’d actually run any OS other than Windows. As a relative newcomer to the Mac, my perspective is that of a switcher.
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