[emodendroket]

I've always felt like people who were buying Office for Mac probably cared more about having a consistent experience than having a Mac-like one and they probably should have hewed more closely to the Windows look and feel. It's like emacs -- how many people choose to use Aquamacs or something instead of just the traditional one?

[dpark]

> I've always felt like people who were buying Office for Mac probably cared more about having a consistent experience than having a Mac-like one

Why would you assume that someone buying Office for Mac is more familiar with Office for Windows than the Mac they own that they want to run Office on?

That could be true for some customers. It's certainly not true for all customers. It's probably also not a given that even someone very familiar with Office for Windows would want Office for Mac to act like that, instead of like a Mac app.

[Aldo_MX]

> Why would you assume that someone buying Office for Mac is more familiar with Office for Windows than the Mac they own that they want to run Office on?

Because Windows had like 90% of the market share?

[dpark]

That's the 90% that didn't buy a Mac. Why does the 10% want a Windows-feeling app when they didn't buy a Windows device?

[emodendroket]

Well it was certainly true of me and I think it's true of a lot of people who want to buy Office because it's what they use at work and are familiar with. I think if you cared more about a Mac-like experience you'd buy Pages and such (although it is not as feature-rich, to be fair).

[dpark]

As AdrianN pointed out, the primary use case for Office for Mac is interoperability. If you don't care about interoperability, you probably would buy Pages. Or just use Google Docs. You buy Office for Mac because that's the format your office uses, or your professor expects, or whatever. You probably don't buy Office for Mac out of some longing for a Windows interface.

If "familiarity because I use it at work" is the primary criterion, you'd probably have bought a PC.

[emodendroket]

I basically think of it like something like emacs, where it doesn't conform to the OS at all but instead works exactly the same throughout different platforms (and users who are intimately familiar with it expect that). The interop in Office for Mac was also just about as lousy as Pages for a long time although I think more recent versions may have improved it.

[dpark]

I don't think the two are comparable. Emacs is a bizarre beast that fits no common UI paradigm/design language/whatever. It has its own shortcut system, its own undo/redo behavior, its buffer concept, etc. Everything about it is EMACS. If you use Emacs, it's specifically because you want to use Emacs and all it's uniqueness. It's consequently a love-it-or-hate it tool, and it's extremely niche relative to Word, or I bet even gedit.

Office, on the other hand, you probably use because you need to create Office-formatted docs. Very few people are likely buying Office because they long for the Office interface. Office doesn't even have a consistent interface paradigm. They've reinvented it repeatedly, culminating in the Ribbon UI. But at the end of the day, Office's interface is a Windows interface. They've done their own thing, but it's still clearly Windows, and shoehorning that interface onto a Mac feels out of place in a way it doesn't on Windows.

I can't comment on interop. It's been a while since I used Office for Mac. I don't recall any notable interop issues, but I mostly used the mail client (Entourage, later Outlook). I used Word sometimes but wasn't exactly writing for publication.

[emodendroket]

I guess I use Word in a different way than most? I used to be a major user of advanced features like the VBA editor, style editor, etc., and having that all work totally differently bothered me.

If you just want .doc files lots of programs will do it cheaper.

[adrianN]

In my experience, the people buying Office for mac care most about seamless interoperating with all the people who insist on using Office to for all their business needs.

[emodendroket]

And you don't think a consistent interface is part of that seamlessness?

Anyway, at least in 2011 it failed in that metric too, because documents would look quite different on the Mac version than on the Windows version in many cases.

What I really wanted, at the time, was the exact same experience on both platforms, from feature set, to way of use, to the look of documents rendered, and since it didn't really deliver that I was disappointed.

[dpark]

> And you don't think a consistent interface is part of that seamlessness?

No, not at all. I don't care that my UI is consistent with yours. I care that you can open the doc I sent you.