microsoft madness

i’m constantly amazed at the difference between microsoft and apple, and it’s a pretty stark difference, let me tell you.

after having used a mac now for just about a year, i will NEVER go back to using a PC, partly because of the inferior design of most PCs, but largely due to microsoft.

example in point… my mac runs just fine, and all the native apps are very cool and quick, etc. whenever anything crashes on this thing, it’s almost 99.9% like to be one of the microsoft apps in the office package. everything has been reasonably stable for a while, but a recent update to the microsoft office 2004 package has resulted in my entourage hanging 3 times now in 2 days. it’s just amazing to me that a company with the resources and sheer money to throw at tech problems just struggles to get things right on a regular basis, and vista is probably their crowning glory.

i’m seriously now trying to find a way to stop using entourage and move as much as possible towards using the native apple apps, although the biggest issue is exchange server support. this, it seems to me, is a key issue that apple must get on top of if they want to completely convert people like me away from any dependance at all on microsoft products. the apple mail app does have exchange support, but it’s a bit limited. there’s no current calendar syncing either, so that’s a problem. i’d be tempted to even move totally to using gmail as my email client (even if it is web-based), if they could crack the exchange sync problem. dunno, but if i could possibly ditch all microsoft products from my world, i would. they are just ridiculously poor for a company with the heft of microsoft.

so, just killed entourage and rebooted it, but i’m on the journey towards something else now…

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 28th, 2008 at 11:58 am and is filed under tech. You can feed this entry. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

6 Responses

  1. I’m pretty happy with Office 2008 – no huge bugs, although Messenger seems to crash quite a lot

    Baggas - June 28th, 2008 at 8:58 pm

  2. how have you gone with having entourage 2008 reactivate properly after shutting and opening your lid? i believe that’s been a problem which is now fixed in the latest update for 2008.

    i did work on an issue for a friend who couldn’t seem to open powerpoints from uni on their macbook because of a problem in pp2008 – that turned out to be a bug which got fixed in the first update to mac office 2008.

    nah – i’d be happy to leave microsoft behind.

    ob1 - June 29th, 2008 at 6:18 am

  3. I’ve been using Office 2004 for 2 1/2 years and haven’t had many problems with it.
    I’m waiting for 2008 to be mailed to me this week so looking forward to that.
    I’m a tightarse so since paying for Office I’d rather use that than the Apple programs!!

    Gaz - June 29th, 2008 at 11:55 am

  4. Gaz, you’re still on a PowerPC platform, though, aren’t you? You still got that Powerbook or did you upgrade?

    Might be a different situation on that platform. On the Intel platform, the latest update seems to have created random problems.

    ob1 - June 29th, 2008 at 2:34 pm

  5. No major problems with Entourage, although I must admit I haven’t needed to use Powerpoint so can’t really comment on that. Word is sweet and Excel is fine also.

    Baggas - June 29th, 2008 at 3:39 pm

  6. Yeah, still using my ibook, so maybe that’s an issue for you.

    Gaz - June 30th, 2008 at 8:05 am