My New Year's Resolution

  New Year's Resolutions 
  Originally uploaded by www.DaveWard.net.

I know its early to be making a New Year's Resolution, but I've made up my mind and so here it is:

I am going to remove Microsoft from my life in 2007. I made the move to Apple in 2006. But I have simply adopted the same Microsoft apps I used on my ThinkPad - Entourage/Outlook, Word, Excel, Powerpoint. I haven't used Internet Explorer since making the switch and that's gone fine.

I've been having huge problems with Entourage. I've known for months that I have to get off of it. It's slow, bloated, gives me beach balls all day long, and it stinks as a mail app anyway. The only plus is it synchs with Exchange. But I may have to drop Exchange too or find a native Mac app that synchs with Exchange.

But I wasn't planning on dropping all Microsoft apps until I saw this news today. Office 2007 apps - Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc use "open XML formats". They should be called "closed XML formats" because Office for Mac won't be able to open them.

The bottom line is Microsoft doesn't care about Mac users. That's been obvious for a while now. So I don't care about Microsoft either.

It will be fun to use Google spreadsheet, Writely, and other more web native apps anyway. Not sure what I'll do on airplanes, but I'll figure something out.

Starting Jan 1, 2007 I will be on a mission to remove Microsoft from my life. It's long overdue.

Comments

[curmudgeonly troll]

Feld seems to disagree :

Why I'm Installing Vista on All My Computers
http://www.feld.com/blog/archives/002098.html

Hope you guys compare notes and see who ends up happier, I mean less aggravated.

[evbart]

I've had the same problems as I moved to Mac. In the office we use exchange with entourage, and its been a real hassle just using it on the desktop much less trying to sync it to my Treo.

I've heard decent things said about Now Contacts and Calendar

http://www.nowsoftware.com/

Anyone else out there have some suggestions, including for syncing data to handhelds?

[Chris Kerns]

OpenOffice for Mac should take care of you while you are offline.

Chris

[Timothy Li]

Dear writer:
How do you deal with the lack of ability to paste images smoothly into a google document? it's so incredibly hard to work around.

Tim.

[riaan nolan]

I don't use microsucs for a while now, they are just getting stinking rich, by marketing bad applications, that cost you more money in the long run! WELL DONE TO YOU! and best of luck! if you need any linux or mac help, please email me, i'll dish it out for free, mahala :)

All the best mate!
Ciao/Riaan

[Brad Feld]

It's be interesting to see which one of us is happier with our compute infrastructure on 1/1/08...

[Karen E]

Dropping Microsoft programs is an extremely interesting issue to me, a longtime Mac user. I currently work as a consultant marketer; one of the distinct advantages of working for myself is creating and maintaining a pure Mac environment. The problem always comes of course when working for other people (whose minds have been colonized by Microsoft - sorry, can't resist). I always add the caveat that I am not a programmer, so I need ready-to-go, good-GUI programs.

1. As Tim mentions above, it's very hard to put graphics into many text-document programs. Word was never good at it, so I wouldn't miss it in that sense. The best is InDesign, which is a pure dream to work in, but people who aren't Adobe-native don't appreciate receiving a PDF as a document (understandably). But InDesign is so, so good. I wonder if there is hope there ... comments?

1a. Maybe Adobe could step up to the plate for us - fill some gaps. They have been in the Mac corner all along. Couldn't they make simple, open programs that could then be distributed by their large machine?

2. Fred, can you live without Excel? Just curious. What will you use to replace it?

3. Could we hear from any hardcore users of Mac native and/or Linux-based apps?

4. On a plane, of course, Fred, plain text files are great. Scribble your thoughts down immediately; cut, paste, and format later. I'm doing that right now to work out the thoughts before putting them glibly into the comment box!

I hope this thread stays alive. It's compelling.

[Brooke]

Congrats -
Between getting your resoulutions out of the way in early December and going MSFT-free, '07 should be a productive year for you.

I have been w/o MSFT for about 6 months now and have to say that I cannot think of a case where it has been a problem. In cases where Im away from an Internet connection (amazing how infrequently that is) a simple text editor works. You might want to take a look at http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/product/writeroom . It's very basic but w/o any distractions, buttons or animated paper-clips I find that I get a ton done.

[Rogel]

Not that you should change your mind about dropping Microsoft - it should be interesting experiment, but I have two small comments:
1. You are dropping Microsoft in favor of yet another close code company. If the reason for dropping Microsoft is the use of close code, why not dropping Mac OS X as well?
2. Older version of Office for regular PC would not be able to work with the new format as well. It is not a common among software producers (not only Microsoft) to create new format that will be supported by old versions of the application. The support it that the new version will be able to handle older version (which is the case with Office 2007 as well). Microsoft claim that it is an Open XML format is actually correct since you can open the documents with any XML reader (even with win zip!) - so any one can write applications to read the new documents.

[Kristopher Wood]

Fred,

Like, you, I am trying to live Microsoft-free as well. While not perfect, I have gotten used to Pages (Apple's word processing app) and it's not bad. Obviously Keynote can replace PowerPoint but I still haven't found a way to move from Excel.

For mail and contact information, you may want to try two things. First, you can sync Apple Mail with Exchange. Even though the Address Book indicates it can sync in Exchange I haven't been able to get it to work - although you may. There is also an application called Group Cal that will sync iCal with Exchange, although I don't think it works too well.

What I have done is set up Entourage to work with Exchange, but in Entourage's preferences, I use sync services to have the Entourage Exchange calendar and Exchange address book automatically sync with Address Book and Mail. It's not the best solution as it still involves Entourage, but at least you don't have to USE Entourage. Any changes I make to iCal or Address Book get sent to Entourage automatically, which updates Exchange, which then updates my Blackberry.

Another great email, calendar, address book service is Zimbra. Their web client works great on FireFox and it's functionality is fantastic. There are a lot of features many email providers don't provide and they use a "Zimlet" (widgets for Zimbra) feature that anyone can add to. You can also use Zimbra with Apple's mail, calendar and address book. Zimbra does not have native blackberry support, although they have partnered with a third party provider. I haven't used it yet (the hosted Zimbra providers that currently have the partnership working are too expensive for my taste) but assuming it works, that would provide a total Microsoft free solution. I currently use Sonoma Creative as my Zimbra provider (they have a nice price point for personal mail) and look forward to abandoning Microsoft and Entourage all together when they get their Blackberry solution up).

Also, Apple will hopefully have it's iPhone shortly that will be an elegant smartphone which will eliminate the need for Exchange.

[Kayvon]

I've tried working within several web-based spreadsheet tools (seeking ease of collaboration and machine-independent access to my work) but have always found that the lack of power-user functionality and Excel-type shortcut keys ruins my productivity and, with it, the overall experience.

Similarly, when my brother bought a Mac this fall I was blown away by the beauty of the machine and the interface and considered making the switch myself, only to discover that Excel for Mac uses a completely different shortcut scheme from the PC version, with no obvious remapping function available.

So, it seems my putative move to the Mac platform has been postponed indefinitely (I hate the idea of dual-boot), but I'm looking forward to reevaluating my web-based spreadsheet options in a few months.

As for the OpenOffice suggestion: In my consulting days, circa 2002, I was staffed on a project for SUNW, and they refused to accept any deliverable in Microsoft Office format. The entire team ended up using either StarOffice (very buggy at the time) or OpenOffice (great suite), and I would definitely recommend OpenOffice to anyone looking to move away from MSFT in the future.

[mark slater]

couple of points fred:

remember this?
http://news.com.com/MS+to+invest+150+million+in+Apple/2100-1001_3-202143.html

Dont know if they still have any ownership - but none the less...

Also - just had a run out with google spreadsheets with my firm as we try and standardize on a truly remote collab tool for managing our business. In short it is not strong enough. Formulas are hard to implement, and frankly we find ourselves bringing our management spreadsheet back in to excel, working it in there, and reposting - and that did not work well. as the syncing app is not good. If you are even an intermediate Excel user, the app just wont work well - i need full keyboard commands, snappy response etc.

So we have now moved on to prodct 6 (i kid you not - zimbra, teamscope, salesforce, office live, netvibes, Goog,) and its called Koral. So far so good. Very clean delivery of a social enterprise collab app.

In short while i would love to not be too dependent - in my world of finance, excel can not be beat i am afraid.

[Mark Frisk]

I would just like to echo, and amplify, the commenter above who mentioned Open Office.

From what I've seen and heard (raves), Open Office is a serious, robust solution. Here's what their home page has to say:

--------

free office suite

OpenOffice.org is a multiplatform and multilingual office suite and an open-source project. Compatible with all other major office suites, the product is free to download, use, and distribute. To help build the community, join us.

---------

As someone who has recently moved back to the Mac platform after a 13 month tour of duty in Windows Land, I am thanking my stars for my new gig and my new MacBook Pro.

But I am distressed to read about Office 2007's non-compatibility with Mac Office.

Open Office seems like a wonderful solution for anyone looking to untether from Microsoft.

Here's the link:

http://www.openoffice.org/

[Adam Kalsey]

NeoOffice is a Mac-native GUI for OpenOffice.org. It's great, but a little slow. The native keyboard shortcuts and UI qidgets more than make up for the performance shortcomings.

For web-office software, I'm finding ThinkFree office to be smooth and easy to use. In a week of using it I haven't found any features I miss from desktop office apps.

ThinkFree was hard to sign up for from a Mac, however. See http://kalsey.com/2006/12/thinkfree_making_it_hard_to_sign_up/ for more on that.

[Steve]

Have you given openoffice a look recently it seems to be always getting getter. It's what I use on my mac and pc now and I haven't had (m)any problems.

[Ted]

Fred,

With respect to exchange. Apple mail (not the best program, but better than Entourage) can work with Exchange and there is a third party program called SnerdMail that integrates most of Exchange, even calendering.

[Trey]

http://blogs.msdn.com/macmojo/
source: mactopia blog

here's been some pretty alarmist news stories this morning (apcstart.com; CrunchGear) about file format converters and Office for Mac. Because some of these stories seem designed more to inflame than inform, I want to reiterate our previously reported intention to provide free converters, clarify our timing for their release, and also give some direction on how best to avoid incompatibility until they are available.

Be it resolved: The Mac BU WILL issue free, downloadable file format converters that allow users to read the new Microsoft Office Open XML Format. We announced that publicly at WWDC, and nothing has changed.

Timing: We’re working on our file format converters as I write. We had to wait until Office 2007 bits and the new file format itself were locked down. During this time, we spent the last year and a half prepping and planning for our own development of file format converters for Office for Mac. This included the basic supporting work of a rich and compatible XML parser, code to understand the new package structure, and beginning work on reading and writing early development versions of the file format. So now that Office for Windows has been released, we are working on completing compatibility with the released formats, while also completing other major work such as moving our codebase to the Intel platform, which we have discussed at some length on this very blog and elsewhere. We are running on target and expect to release a free public beta version of the file format converters in Spring 2007, with final converters available six to eight weeks after we launch our next version of Office for Mac (which, as previously reported, will be available 6-8 months after general availability of Win Office.) The next version of Office for Mac will natively read the Open XML Format; users of the current version of Office will have converters in order to maintain compatibility with the new Office for Windows.

There will be a delta between general availability of Win Office (January) and converters from MacBU (expected late March/early April.) We realize this will be an inconvenience for some of you (trust me, we know - 90% of Microsoft has been dogfooding Office 2007 for many months, and we in the MacBU are well used to asking for down-reved versions ourselves). For now, we recommend that Mac users advise their friends and colleagues using Office 2007 to save their documents as a “Word/Excel/PowerPoint 97-2003 Document” (.doc, .xls, .ppt) to ensure the documents can be shared across platforms.

I am also an advid mac user, but frankly I like word, excel and powerpoint.

[Trey]

noticed a bunch of comments regarding blackberry and macs. I use mail, ical and addr book and have "0" need for entourage and this free application synchs perfectly with my blackberry..

just fyi:

www.pocketmac.com/products/pmblackberry/index.html

[Marcos Toledo]

Zimbra's office suite works both online and offline, in case you want to give it a try

[Average Betty]

I second the NeoOffice vote (http://www.neooffice.org/)... just a great office suite. Free, stable, compatible with MS Office, and you gotta love the Publish-as-PDF button in every app - priceless. The "Aqua Beta 3" release is considerably faster than the non-aqua versions. Highly recommended.

[CoryS]

An unfortunate prediction emerges on this topic that even I fear saying in response...

The trio combination of X Box + Media Center + Zune will be very compelling in 1-2 years to make the home user market more interested v. Apple, then you're back to your debate.

This will all be confused if/when Apple runs OS X on top of Vista making your choice of operating systems irrelevant and, in that manner, your choice in hardware less relevant as well.

If Apple products can become more cross platform compatible, they could do what Microsoft did to Lotus back in the day. Should be fun to see play out.

[joshua]

Wouldn't banishing Microsoft involve ditching Exchange, too?

Unfortunately, Excel is probably the best product Microsoft makes, with Outlook a close second. Not much else on the market compares...

[joshua]

Wouldn't banishing Microsoft involve ditching Exchange, too?

Not that I'm a Microsoft apologist or anything but unfortunately, Excel is probably the best product Microsoft makes, with Outlook a close second. Not much else on the market compares...

[Charlie Crystle]

"I used to hate Microsoft until I realized it had no effect on them."

--COM expert talking to UNIX conference

[Gregg]

We looked at a product called Kerio instead of Exchange. It's a pretty interesting product, but couldn't handle our mid-size, multi-location needs as effectively as Exchange.

I can't imagine life without Excel though.