Hi Moro:
Well, it started out simple
Microsoft chose a sub-set of the
functionality from PC Word and re-wrote it for Mac OS X. They had neither
the time nor the money to bring the whole thing over, so they left out the
stuff that 80 per cent of us never use. Which seriously annoyed *me*,
because I am one of the 20 per cent.
Microsoft also produced Word X for OS 10.0.4. Then Apple started changing
fundamental bits of OS X. We started out with BSD Unix 3.4 - it's now 4.3.
This made some very fundamental changes to the way OS X reads and writes
files to disk.
Apple thought it was a huge joke on Microsoft: all of a sudden, Microsoft's
premier product for the Mac was well and truly broken, while the Apple
applications were all updated and worked correctly. This had something to
do with the fact that Apple knew they were going to make these changes
before they did so, and so had time to fix all their applications.
Microsoft found out when System Update bought the updates to a computer near
you. I am not sure that Apple's *users* thought it was all that funny, mind
you. Many of *us* are trying to earn our living with software that used to
work...
To answer your question, no it is not difficult to translate the functions
to an Apple environment, but it requires many programmers doing a whole lot
of detail work. For example, a "file" on Windows is not the same thing as a
"file" on Mac OS X. And even something as seemingly simple and fundamental
as a File > Open commend does not behave the same way, or do the same things
on both operating systems. This means there are literally thousands upon
thousands of individual changes that need to be made to the code on each
platform. And each change must be "perfect" because we're talking about
very fundamental parts of the program here. Not difficult, but fiddly,
time-consuming, and expensive.
OK to do it once, they budgeted for that. When Apple released OS 10.1,
there was a raft of changes in the way things worked. Microsoft bit the
bullet and put a team on to fix everything, then released the Office Update
10.1.5. The cost completely blew any hope of making a profit from the tiny
amount of sales that the Mac Platform generates, of course, but Microsoft
wrote it off to future investment.
Then Apple released OS 10.2. More changes, more fundamental, and larger.
It's these changes that broke your ability to remember preferences. You
have preference files that have become mangled by the differences between
the OS 10.1 file I/O APIs and the OS 10.2 APIs to do the same thing. Office
can read them but not write to them. Other posters have told you you need
to remove your preference files to fix this: by which they mean "move them
to the trash, then empty the trash". On Mac OS X, a delete ain't a delete
unless you also empty the trash. When you delete Microsoft Office
preferences, Microsoft Office automatically creates a new set reflecting the
current system environment the next time it starts. The new set will not be
corrupted, Office will now be able to write to them, and your settings will
be remembered. But if you have "deleted" preferences in the trash, they
remain in service under OS X. This prevents Office from creating a clean
new set. Personally, *I* would not have designed an operating system that
permits files to remain in service from the trash, but then I don't own
Apple Computing either!
Could Microsoft sit down and re-write Office X all over again for Jaguar.
Of course it could. Will it? No chance. Why? Because of the different
nature of the companies. Apple makes its profit from selling "computers".
Microsoft makes its profit from selling "software". Apple can thus defray
its expenses across all of the hardware and software on the computer it
sells you. So long as it makes a profit on the whole bundle, it is doing
good business, even if the amount of effort it put into, say, Safari is just
a complete "cost" with no return at all. Microsoft, on the other hand, has
to say "We sold Office X for "n" dollars per copy. If we do any more work
on it, we would be spending more than we sold it for, and at the same time
shooting ourselves in the foot by removing the user's need to upgrade."
I keep saying that "Any fool with a compiler can make software. Selling it
at a profit is quite a bit more difficult!" The fact that some of *my*
money went down the hole with Jaguar and that I now have a copy of MS Office
that I can't use for the purpose I bought it for, does not alter the
fundamental economics of the industry. Apple needs to learn not to break
software on its installed user base with its updates. Microsoft could have
warned it of this necessity: it's one thing that Microsoft is (now!) good
at. Word 2 and Word 6 for the PC run perfectly on any Microsoft operating
system later than DOS 3.5. I have copies installed here on Windows XP (and,
believe it or not, in the next version of Windows which is in beta now).
Of course, every new version of a product may introduce features that
require new service that are provided only by the newer operating systems.
Word 95 introduced Unicode text, Word 97 introduced 2 GB file sizes; both of
these require the 32-bit processing and addressing that are not available in
DOS. Microsoft Office 2003 has some stuff in it that I am not yet allowed
to talk about, but it requires operating system services provided only on
Windows 2000 Sp 3 and above.
Microsoft Office 11 for the Mac is being developed on OS 10.3 (Panther). It
will work fine on OS 10.2, but a small number of features will not be
available unless you run it on Panther.
Hope this helps
This responds to microsoft.public.mac.office.word on 14 Jul 2003 11:56:20
-0700, (e-mail address removed) (Moro):
Thanks. It seems I am the one that has all the existing bugs, my
personal punishment fro switching to Mac. My Word X doesn't remember
anythingit seems. I have to constantly change defaults once and
again. It would be logic to have the same features we have on Office
for Windows. Is it so difficult to just translate the same functions
to an Apple environment? Even the most simple taks are not possible.
Moro
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John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
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