A tour of Microsoft's Mac labs

I like the Steve-isms in the article:

"...Apple Remote Desktop comes to the rescue! When we need to see all the machines at once we just select them and BOOM! they're there."

"Rotates like butter!"

#1: There is a "Notebook View" implementet in MS Office 2004, it has some very nice features and I have used it a lot for note taking. I don't know if it has the all the same features as One Note, but as far as I know it has at least some.

The easy answer is that the MacBU answers to Gates and Ballmer et al. They don't want Messenger for Mac to be feature-complete, because a feature-complete Messenger is a selling point for home users, at least in large parts of Europe where it's a clear market leader. As good as a Mac is, if your 11-year old is whining that 'all my friends can send winks on Messenger, why can't I', you might not want to buy them a Mac mini. I'm of course talking about John Q. Consumer here, not tech-savvy geeks.

Selling a crippled Word would not be in their interests, because a large portion of existing Mac users will NEVER migrate to a Windows PC, and therefore the only way Microsoft benefits from them is through offering a feature-complete Mac version of Word.

Hey, it sucks, but when Leopard comes out, those who need winks and nudges can run MSN Messenger in a VM.

What I don't get about the Microsoft MacBU is this.

Supposedly, they're all diehard Mac heads, they by all accounts (including this one) are a fairly significant part of the business at least, and have pimped out development offices. Why then does the latest version of MSN Messenger, years in the making, sport a grand total of two new features; namely, user icons and direct file transfers, something that the PC version has had since the dawn of time, and a version of Office that however swish looking is overloaded with useless features and is bloat-coded in the extreme?

That's an awesome lab.

#1: one note for mac? for that to be useful wouldn't you need a tablet mac to go along with it? i assume that if a tablet mac is ever released, onenote will be sure to follow, although i'd imagine Apple to release something at least on par with it.

That is one hell of a lab. Can't wait for a universal version of office, but what's killing me now is that there is no one note for the mac.

when/if i switch that's going to be the hardest application to do without. is there anything similar to one note on the mac that i just don't know about yet?