[Steve_S]

aramp said:

iWork is not a threat to Microsoft, because it is Mac only.

Yes, obviously it's not a threat to Microsoft for the Windows platform. However, for the Mac platform it is. Right now, overall, Office is still a better product, but with each release, the difference seems to narrow. Further, I don't really see MS adding much beyond interface changes and possibly templates with recent releases.

>OpenOffice is terrible. At some point I was considering to replace MS office in some scenarios with OpenOffice. That did not work. The word processor in OpenOffice is more or less usable,Calc is a nuisance compared to Excel, Impress is impossible to use, other apps in the package are toys.
I would agree that the user interface is lousy with OpenOffice, but functionally, I'd challenge your assessment of the word processor and spreadsheet. The presentation module is below par, I'd agree with that.

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As to PowerPoint compatibility, I agree there are issues. What I have learned from my experience with presentations, most problems are related to fonts not available at another machine.

This isn't as big of a deal for Word or Excel, but it's a nightmare for PowerPoint. The issue is this. Microsoft is making the assumption that Windows users will never present on a Mac and Mac users will never present on a Windows box. That doesn't cut it. The major benefit of using a common software package across platforms is compatibility. In and off itself, PowerPoint is generally considered a weaker product than Keynote, though I'd agree Microsoft has been doing a good job of keeping the products close.

>In Windows it is easy to fix: Microsoft has developed a technology called "font embedding", so you may keep all the fonts you need with the presentation. There is no such technology on Mac. So Mac PowerPoint files do not carry any fonts.
No, this is not a Mac problem, this is a PowerPoint problem. PDF files embed fonts and work just fine on both PCs and Macs. Yes, Microsoft would actually have to write a common rendering engine to make that happen, but for a presentation program, that's not exactly unreasonable.

>Because Mac OS X renders the same TrueType font differently, PowerPoint for Mac and PowerPoint for Windows display the same text differently. That is a major issue.
Agreed.

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Microsoft tried to take care compatibility issues by introducing a special compatibility check. Any time you plan to use the file on Windows or previous versions of Office, it is advised to check the compatibility. It helps, but not always.

It doesn't help much at all.

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It is important to understand that Adobe's approach is not possible for Microsoft. Adobe does have its own font rendering engine. That it because they invented vector fonts, PostScript and PDF.

Baloney. You're making excuses. Apple developed it's own rendering engine (Quartz) that it uses for OS X and also ported to Windows with Safari. Microsoft is (or at least should) be capable of doing the same for PowerPoint.

>However, you might notice that Adobe PDF viewer shows the text differently from the Preview.
Right, because the two programs are using different rendering engines to display the same file format. However, you'll notice that Acrobat displays files on Windows exactly as it does on Macs. That's because they share a common rendering engine. Similarly, Apple has done this with Safari on both Mac and Windows. Microsoft should do the same with PowerPoint.

>That might be OK for PDF. But for regular productivity applications that work with regular documents such approach does not work.Users are used to how fonts are rendered in Mac OS X, they are used to Mac-specific view of Arial, Times New Roman and other popular fonts. They would heavily object to see the same font totally differently in Word or Excel. As a matter of fact, that would create another anti-Microsoft storm.
Look, I can't comment on whether something Microsoft does will get someone upset. Clearly, no matter what MS does, somewhat will be upset. Microsoft has the following choices:

1. Use native rendering engines on both Mac and Windows. Result: Inconsistent layouts and rendering between platforms. While each application "feels" native, cross platform compatibility suffers (heavily).

2. Use common rendering engines on both Mac and Windows. Result: Consistent layouts and rendering across platforms. Possibly, some Mac users will complain because Windows rendering technologies have been considered inferior. (Cleartype for example looks okay on the screen, but distorts fonts in order to fit to grid).

3. Use common rendering engine only on PowerPoint. Result: Word and Excel would still feel native and have minor inconsistencies between platforms, but the important presentation module, PowerPoint, would have consistent output. Clearly, this would be a compromise, but it would address the biggest compatibility issue.

4. Offer both choices where the end user can switch between native or Microsoft rendering. Result: More work for Microsoft, but would make everyone happy.

>Besides, to render Adobe Postscript fonts Microsoft uses code licensed from Adobe for Windows only. So porting Windows font engine to Mac is not possible.
Sorry, but I don't believe Microsoft isn't capable of reverse engineering their own rendering engine. Apple/NeXT was in the same situation when they used Display Postscript. Apple spent the time to build it's own engine. Microsoft could do the same.

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You have provided an example of Safari working the same way on Windows and Mac. Safari uses WebKit that is initially portable, so Apple has to actually port the shell only. However we all know there were initially many problems with Windows rendering of WebKit that were fixed on the way. And still, if you compare how the same HTML is displayed by the same WebKit on Windows and on Mac, you will find differences.

No, I'm not clear on the differences you mention. In the past, I've compared fairly complex CSS layouts between Mac and Windows versions of Safari. I haven't seen the differences you suggest. Would you be able to point me to an example? I think you're missing some of what Apple did with Safari. Webkit was just part of the equation. Apple also ported their font rendering technology over to Windows with Safari. Google's Chrome for example uses web kit, but with native Windows font rendering. Chrome and Safari's font rendering look different. Safari Windows and Safari Mac font rendering do not look different. Apple has done exactly what I'm suggesting Microsoft should also do. Though, ideally, there would be an option to use application specific or native font rendering.

My point is: compatibility is important, no doubt. But 100% compatibility is not possible in this case.
I disagree. What is possible and what is likely are two very different things. It most certainly is possible to have common rendering engines for application software. Yes, it's considerably more work, but it's certainly possible. Look at what Apple and Adobe have done for example. For that matter, we don't hear Mac users complaining about InDesign not using Quartz rendering, do we? Adobe understands the importance of compatibility (not to mention the possibility of doing so). Microsoft doesn't get it.

>Personally I am happy that Microsoft has chosen to separate Mac and Windows office development. When comparing upsides and downsides of that, I think we come up with more upsides.Separate focused team is better than one team having primary and important platform and secondary and unimportant. Adobe, as I have noticed before, is in the different position. For pro design applications their Mac business is comparable to Windows business for historical reasons.

That's obviously debatable. Given Microsoft's history, I would agree that Microsoft produced a much better product by having a Mac specific team. Yes, Word 6.0 was a steaming pile of crap. This was Microsoft's attempt to attain feature parity. They dumped the Word 5.0 code base and ported Word 2 (on Windows) over to the Mac. The result was a very bloated and slow performing application. Worse, the application ignored many common Mac conventions that made the application feel like a Mac application. Here's an interesting read..
http://blogs.msdn.com/rickschaut/archive/2004/02/26/80193.aspx

To that end, I have no issue with Microsoft making a Mac specific product. However, where we disagree is that I don't believe that decision precludes Microsoft from creating a common rendering engine to be used with all or even some applications like PowerPoint.

[aramp]

Steve_S,

I hate to be insistent, but I really would like to convey the idea to you. You gave an example of Safari having the same rendering engine on Mac and PC. It looks like Safari uses its own Truetype font rendering engine, ignoring the one provided by Windows. The result is that the commonly used fonts look different from the way Windows displays them. Is that good for Windows user? Not at all. From his point of view that is incompatibility. Because from his point of view Arial looks the way he is used to, and any other display of Arial is irritating. That could be one of reasons why Safari is not popular at all in Windows world. So, solving one compatibility problem, Apple bumped into another. Safari, BTW, had a special mission: provide web designers that don't have a Mac a way to check their web sites against Safari, that is why they had to provide exactly the same view, which is not always good.

And still, I would like to provide you with a sample when Safari 3.2 latest version on Windows and on Mac render the same page differently. I made two screenshots of our internal SharePoint 2003 based portal (sorry, it is in Russian), in both cases text zoom in Safari is set to "Normal". See here: http://picasaweb.goo...fariWebBrowser#

Still, as you may see, the result is largely different (and, BTW, very irritating, that's why I prefer Firefox, it does better with SharePoint). And now think about that. The same code. Exactly the same functionality (which is not the case for Office, as a matter of fact, because Mac and Windows users want different things). Still, there is a discrepancy. I have checked several other sites I read time to time, the rendering was different in many cases. The difference was less visible than in the particular case of SharePoint, but it was there.There are other compatibility problems (automated encoding sensing works differently, it is impossible on Safari for Windows to set up the preferred language, which makes it impossible for me to use it with Outlook Web Access, etc). Will you still insist on Safari as a good example?

Adobe products also have compatibility problems, less on PDF side, more on Photoshop/Illustrator side. I have bumped into several such problems, mostly in the printing, display profiles, and once I even had a problem with file format.

So we can not talk about absolute compatibility. We may only talk about the measure. It might be that Microsoft has set too low measure, and you want them to make it higher. I insist that it is enough to have version-to-version compatibility level. You want to have a level of compatibility as for the same version. From my point of view provided that actual product requirements from Mac and Windows users are different, and product release cycles are different, and at the same Windows and Mac releases could not be too far away in the calendar, having that level of compatibility is nearly impossible or is prohibitively expensive.

[Steve_S]

aramp said:

I hate to be insistent, but I really would like to convey the idea to you. You gave an example of Safari having the same rendering engine on Mac and PC. It looks like Safari uses its own Truetype font rendering engine, ignoring the one provided by Windows. The result is that the commonly used fonts look different from the way Windows displays them. Is that good for Windows user? Not at all.

The problem with your comment is that it is completely subjective. It is your opinion that this is not good. It is my opinion that it is good. Who's right and who's wrong? Conceptually, I agree that users prefer consistency. But, what does that mean? Does that mean that everything on Windows has to use Cleartype? If so, why don't we hear the same cries of pain from users viewing PDF files? I would argue that constancy across platforms, be it PDF, Safari, PowerPoint, etc. is more important than consistency on a platform by platform basis. If Adobe had to use Cleartype, there would be no way of making sure Acrobat documents had any level of consistency across platforms or across versions of the same operating system for that matter. Clearly, there is a case for sharing common rendering engines. At this point, let's just respect that we agree to disagree on this issue.

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From his point of view that is incompatibility. Because from his point of view Arial looks the way he is used to, and any other display of Arial is irritating.

Incompatibility with what? Is any font displayed with Microsoft's Cleartype consistent with the intended font design? No. Cleartype forces shapes to a grid and often distorts the font for the sake of perceived clarity. Do you mean compatibility with "standard windows rendering" or the Mac version of Safari? Is the end user just a web browser or a web developer? If it's a web developer, consistency across platforms is a huge advantage. The developer can test a web page against Safari on Windows and know what he's going to get on the Mac side. As you mentioned, Apple went the extra mile to do this for a reason. Yes, I agree there will be critics that don't like this. In an ideal world, it would be nice to have that as an option to turn this feature on or off as they choose. I'm guessing Apple doesn't want to add one more variable for web developers to test against.

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And still, I would like to provide you with a sample when Safari 3.2 latest version on Windows and on Mac render the same page differently. I made two screenshots of our internal SharePoint 2003 based portal (sorry, it is in Russian), in both cases text zoom in Safari is set to "Normal". See here: http://picasaweb.goo...fariWebBrowser#

I saw your example and honestly, I don't know what to make of it. To me, it looks like you just hit the enlarge text option for one example. I'm not quite sure why you couldn't just make the point with a common web page that I can verify on my own as opposed to your own sharepoint location. In short, there is no way to verify the claim you are making. Do you even know if there are any platform specific CSS files involved here? Sharepoint may well handle this automatically and introduce it's own incompatibilities. It would be best to provide an example where you are sure both browsers are rendering to the same source.

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Adobe products also have compatibility problems, less on PDF side, more on Photoshop/Illustrator side. I have bumped into several such problems, mostly in the printing, display profiles, and once I even had a problem with file format.

If you're asking me to agree that absolute compatibility is not always easy or even possible, I do agree. But, that doesn't mean you shouldn't try or that there is no benefit in approaching perfect compatibility. By the logic you've introduced, the student getting a 98% score on his/her test is basically the same as the kid scoring 46%. Neither is 100% perfect, so studying for the test was apparently a waste of effort for the kid who scored 98%, right? That's basically what you're suggesting.

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So we can not talk about absolute compatibility. We may only talk about the measure. It might be that Microsoft has set too low measure, and you want them to make it higher. I insist that it is enough to have version-to-version compatibility level. You want to have a level of compatibility as for the same version. From my point of view provided that actual product requirements from Mac and Windows users are different, and product release cycles are different, and at the same Windows and Mac releases could not be too far away in the calendar, having that level of compatibility is nearly impossible or is prohibitively expensive.

Yes, I am saying that Microsoft has set the bar too low in terms of platform compatibility... and no, I'm not suggesting Microsoft should try to do an exact feature for feature compatibility port for its products. They don't need to. I am suggesting that their products should share a common layout and rendering engine across platforms. How they build platform specific products around those common design elements is completely up to them. The products can look and feel different from an interface perspective. They can make use of OS specific features if necessary, but they should render the same. Yes, that would be additional work, but it would also help make their file formats a standard. PDFs would be much less relevant if Microsoft understood this concept and/or need. I'm not quite sure how you can argue that something like PowerPoint compatibility isn't important across platforms. It's certainly less important in a spreadsheet, but for a presentation program, it's very important. Why do you not complain about Acrobat or InDesign having their own common rendering engines? Why is it not prohibitively expensive for Adobe to get it right? Again, unless you can answer this question, there is really no point arguing this further.

[aramp]

Steve_S,

I was not expecting to be accused of cheating. There are tons of publicly available SharePoint sites around, see here for instance: http://sharepoint.bi...om/default.aspx

As a matter of fact, I gave a second look and I should admit that the problem is not with Safari, it is with SharePoint. For some strange reason SharePoint provides different css for Mac clients (and does not differentiate them). Probably that is an archaic rudiment of Internet Explorer for Mac. Apart from that I should admit Safari is doing very well on cross-platfrom rendering. My experience was based on intranet usage mostly, there came my opinion.

So you are suggesting Microsoft should replace an advanced, well-designed Mac font rendering engine with the much less viable one from Windows (while looks like you are not among ClearType lovers)? And you think Mac users will be happy? Well, probably PowerPoint is the only exception from the whole Office suite, I agree with you here. It would be nice when PowerPoint would render fonts the same way on Mac and PC. But I don't care as much as you do. Probably because I never had any issues actually. My constant trouble (and not only my) is that the PC I am going to use does not have the latest version of PowerPoint installed, or the screen resoultion is low due to bad beamer, or the contrast is terrible and colours are inadequate on the screen.

I personally would prefer the Mac BU team to focus more on converting the PC-based thinking of MS Office for Windows into Mac-like experience, not to have a another terrible multi-platform OpenOffice-like suit.I perfectly understand the current setup of things in MS and I am quite sceptical that it could be changed in the reasonalbe timeframe to what you want: one single multi-platform technology with platform-specific teams developing UI's around it. In the current MS setup that is practically impossible and makes zero sense from pragmatic point of view. Let's put it in this way: if you would be Balmer, would you go for such a dramatic change to make a small minority of Mac users a little bit more happy?

[Steve_S]

aramp said:

I was not expecting to be accused of cheating.

I didn't mean to suggest you were cheating. I was just hoping for a more neutral example that we could examine and discuss openly. I don't think you should feel offended if I wanted to see something for myself which was contrary to everything I've experienced so far.

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As a matter of fact, I gave a second look and I should admit that the problem is not with Safari, it is with SharePoint. For some strange reason SharePoint provides different css for Mac clients (and does not differentiate them).

I'm not surprised by that. As I mentioned in my previous post, this was the most likely explanation for differences found. Clearly, there are some things (especially on the web) that are outside of Apple's (or any single company's) control.

>Probably that is an archaic rudiment of Internet Explorer for Mac. Apart from that I should admit Safari is doing very well on cross-platfrom rendering. My experience was based on intranet usage mostly, there came my opinion.

I understand. No harm done. Actually, I appreciate you acknowledging this point. There is a history behind this. Mac's were known for using 72 dpi and PCs used 96 dpi standards. As we move towards resolution independence, these assumptions which are typically manifested in platform specific CSS files serve to introduce incompatibilities rather than to make pages more compatible as they were originally intended.

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So you are suggesting Microsoft should replace an advanced, well-designed Mac font rendering engine with the much less viable one from Windows (while looks like you are not among ClearType lovers)? And you think Mac users will be happy?

From this thread, I think we've both demonstrated that there is a reasonable argument for either approach. In my mind, the problem is as much a philosophical issue as it is a technical issue. I would agree that Microsoft Office for the Mac is the best all around "Office" product for the Mac platform. Fortunately for both Mac users and for Microsoft, the product seems to be selling well. However, I'd argue that most Mac users don't work in a vacuum. That is, for most Mac users, they are either working on dual platforms (as I assume both of us are) or at a minimum, they are exchanging files with users on the Windows platform. If that's the case, compatibility between platforms becomes very important.

This isn't really a matter of whether I like Cleartype or Quartz rendering better. Personally, I may prefer Quartz, but would I would prefer Cleartype for something like Powerpoint if it meant that I could use the Mac and PC Office products to create Powerpoint presentations interchangeably. Obviously, if I were working in a vacuum, I'd prefer Quartz rendering in PowerPoint.

>Well, probably PowerPoint is the only exception from the whole Office suite, I agree with you here.

For me, that's been a big problem. But, admittedly, I don't really have the problem with Word or Excel. It's not necessarily that the rendering isn't different, rather, it's because the difference isn't enough to be noticeable for me.

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I personally would prefer the Mac BU team to focus more on converting the PC-based thinking of MS Office for Windows into Mac-like experience, not to have a another terrible multi-platform OpenOffice-like suit.

I agree with that. Maybe it's just an issue of expectations. Just as Microsoft renamed Outlook on the PC to Entourage on the Mac, maybe they should do the same with PowerPoint. If you change the name of the product, strong compatibility isn't implied. Everyone would understand they are getting a different product that may have some level of compatibility. As it stands now, my expectations for compatibility are apparently higher than yours.

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I perfectly understand the current setup of things in MS and I am quite sceptical that it could be changed in the reasonalbe timeframe to what you want: one single multi-platform technology with platform-specific teams developing UI's around it. In the current MS setup that is practically impossible and makes zero sense from pragmatic point of view. Let's put it in this way: if you would be Balmer, would you go for such a dramatic change to make a small minority of Mac users a little bit more happy?

Microsoft may very well have good reasons for every decision they've made so far. To that end, I don't recall mentioning a specific time frame. It very well could be a long term direction they strive to achieve. As for Ballmer, based on comments he's made to date, I tend to think he doesn't like the Mac platform as it is a competitor and he seems to enjoy the lack of feature parity between the same product on the two different platforms. He's said something to the effect that Mac users don't have "the real" Office, etc.

Compatibility is a major selling point for the Mac Office product. Microsoft started heading down a slippery slope with Office 2008 as they dropped VB Script support. Mind you, it's not that VB Scipt is something great in and of itself. Rather, it's importance is related to compatibility, particularly with complex spreadsheets. Microsoft received a lot of flack for this decision and rightfully so. It's not surprising that Microsoft somehow found a way to port it to Intel and promised to bring it back with the next version of Office. As much as I am not a fan of solutions like Open Office (poor interface, etc.), decisions like dropping VB Script support are simply driving some percentage of Mac users to adopt OpenOffice as the best solution. There are some PC based spreadsheets that work best for me on NeoOffice (when using the Mac) for example. That's a shame. When free, open source, solutions start offering a more compatible product across platforms, that's usually a time to recognize you have a problem.

Finally, I agree with much of what you said in terms of practical solutions for Microsoft and how users generally prefer font rendering that is consistent and native to their operating system. At the same time, I think there are examples where compatibility across platforms should override such decisions. The obvious examples were Adobe PDF (Acrobat), InDesign and even Apple's Safari. I think we both agree that rendering on Word or Excel isn't as important as something like PowerPoint. Despite this long thread, I think we actually agree on many issues. As both of us have development backgrounds, we understand that good designs often involve compromises to achieve separate and sometimes conflicting goals. Nobody ever said product design and architecture was easy. We're certainly subject to criticism in our business, but maybe that's why we get paid the big bucks... ;-)