Office for Mac Sets Sales Records

In what amounts to a "easy to show big percentage increases when your prior results are so poor" news item, Microsoft announced that it's sales for Office for Mac 2008 are the highest in 19 years and 3 times higher than Office for Mac 2004.

Of course these new sales records are due only to the Mac's success and not the quality of the new Microsoft suite. Can you imagine how many more would be sold if Office for Mac 2008 was any good? It is still a poor step-child to Office 2007. In particular, Entourage is still lacking true Exchange & Blackberry integration and many of the basic features that make Outlook superior. In fact, I've had to switch back to using Outlook in Parallels. It's "great" that it's native Mac for Intel code, but criminal that Microsoft delivers such a poor version compared to what they make available for Windows users.

It's hard not to presume that delivering sub-standard products for the Mac is part of an intentional strategy to drive business users back to the Windows platform even though Vista's stability and overall performance is so disappointing.