Microsoft developer talks about Office 2008 update issues

So just to get this straight: If a Windows user does a selective installation of their Office product (using the options given to them by Microsoft right in the installer), and then applies an update through one of the many methods available, they are good Microsofties and their Office products will work as intended.

But if a Mac user does a selective installation of their Office product (using the options given to them by Microsoft right in the installer), and then applies an update through the only method available, then the update will fail because the MS MacBU forgot to account for the features in their own installer, and it's the end user's fault?

I work at a university audio-visual center and just spent 6 hours installing office 2008 on 5 G4 iBooks.

I did not install Messenger or Entourage because we don't want people using it for those functions.

What amazed me is that there are three updates and each clock in at over 180MB! Sometimes they installed, other times the sencond and third update just hung up and I cancelled it.

Haven't these knuckleheads ever heard of a combined update?

Maybe if Office weren't so horrendously bloated, people wouldn't have to use XSlimmer.

Why doesn't Microsoft change its name to Bloatedsoft, and then we can identify the company by more appropriate initials - BS!

If Mac BU - for that matter the rest of MS - spent the time they used coming up with excuses about why their applications blow to actually write decent code and put time into logical app design, they'd put out good products.

Mac BU isn't evil. Mac BU is sloppy. There's no excuse.

My biggest beef with office 2008 updates isn't with it breaking, it's that it doesn't have a stand alone package installer. I have a fleet of Macs I administer with Apple Remote Desktop and it'd be really easy to do a package update from a Task Server. Just set it up and all the macs get the update automatically. But instead, the updates are things I have to mount on each machine and manually click around. I've tried extracting the package from the updaters... no dice.

For an app that's pretty much an enterprise necessity this is a very enterprise unfriendly way of handling updates. It takes a couple days of my time where it could only take 5 minutes.

Count me as someone who actually likes Office, and prefers the Mac version. I've installed it on multiple Macs, and upgraded without any issues. I didn't muck around with the installation though.

If the problem is related to missing resources, then there's plenty of blame to go around.

Yes, Microsoft Office upgrades...especially patches, should look for and upgrade files that exist, and skip files that don't exist, unless an option has been selected to full-install.

Likewise on original installation, the options should be there to slim-install, eliminating resources like languages that would never be used.

And then Apple itself is to blame here. They've set up a system where it's ok for developers to just pile on unnecessary resources, hell Apple itself does this. I'm hoping this is something they fix in Snow Leopard. It wouldn't be that hard to have a central repository for installed languages, and have applications check there before installing the resources (and share some resources that are there).

Next, you've got to blame the tools. I don't think Monolingual and Xslimmer do a good job of warning users about the dangers of using their apps. To be clear, if you use these utilities, you may find that any app, even those that are fine now, may stop working when upgraded, or prevent you from upgrading. In some cases, re-installing may be a significant problem.

And final blame goes to the users. Really, you should know better than to use these utilities to try to free up a little space when you know you'll be in a situation where re-installing your original apps would be a problem. For example, when you work out of one office and the original disks are kept with a nazi IT department in another office.

I'm about to bail on Office '08 and go back to '04. I just hate the new Excel. Trying to make a simple x-y plot is pure agony. Takes forever, can't figure out how to edit it, etc. If anyone knows how to make this better, please post a URL to the how-to....

markb

The funny thing here is you can use OS X itself to delete language files. Just Get Info on the app, go to the Languages section, select a few, and press the - button. From what I understand this will cause the installer to fail, no different from using a third-party app.

Telling people they can't rename an application folder is pretty poor too.

This reminds me of when I had problems updating Flash. After a long time struggling with it I finally figured out that it was failing because I deleted a Setup.icns file that's directly inside the Adobe Flash CS3 folder. Are you kidding me?

The way some of these companies (namely Microsoft and Adobe) handle this stuff so poorly--and then try to dump the blame elsewhere--is just sad. I realize their apps are much more complicated than most, but they also cost much more, and it shouldn't be that hard to deal with this stuff properly.

I wish TUAW would stop characterizing the issues with poor Microsoft Mac software as "Mac users seeing Microsoft as the enemy". My view of Microsoft has no bearing on the fact that Office 2008 is a completely disappointing mess that actually makes running a full windows virtual machine with Windows Office 2007 a far better option on almost every front.

They messed up. They spent 4 years and delivered something that is barely competent and pales in comparison to its Windows equivalent.

I wish they would reboot the Mac BU and just ask them to do a direct por of the Windows version instead of trying to redesign things they can't materialize properly.

Silly me. I have been using Macs exclusively since the early 1990's and simultaneously have always used Office. Guess what? I never hand issues like the ones I read here. I remember Claris Resolve, MacWrite and now Pages and Numbers. The Apple imitators are just that -- hate to say it.

I love the Mac OS and have found Windows to be about the buggiest, most unstable platform imaginable, but MS Office has always been (and still is) a fine, fine product.