Sneak peek at the new Mactopia site

The Mactopia website is finally changing. It only took them a year or two. The lifeless gray page dating almost 3 years old, reminiscent of Microsoft’s older table-based templates, is being replaced with a slick white-on-black contemporary design in the coming weeks as part of the Office for Mac 2008 release in January. A slide from an internal sales training presentation shows a near-final mockup of what the site will look like.

Mactopia website redesign

Can’t deny the inspiration from the Expression and Microsoft Design sites.

17 insightful thoughts

  1. How long have they referred to themselves as Mactopia? I don’t think that’s a very respectful thing for the MacBU to do.

  2. I don’t understand the business sense in releasing office for the Mac.

    Apple continues to bash Vista every chance it gets and tries to beat it in every department. Now, personally I think Mac/Apple/OS X sucks big time and I would never use them BUT brain washed people around me are starting to believe that.

    Why on earth give users another reason to switch to Apple?!?

    Office 2007 is the only thing keeping users with Vista….

  3. Office 2007 runs on XP.

    I presume they develop software for Macs because it’s a market whether Apple runs those pathetic attack ads or doesn’t. And MS isn’t institutionally bigoted against other tech companies.

  4. Probably because Microsoft wants to be sure that people don’t think Microsoft cares only about itself and Windows, so they make some programs for its rivals.

    Plus, Microsoft can extend it’s global to use, to even the minority.

    And Office 08′ is great on the Mac. Far better than iWork I must add. Of course, not as well done as Office 07′ for Windows. πŸ™‚

  5. Grrrrr. Mac. Begin the fanboy war! Either way, it makes sense for Microsoft to try and have a foothold on all platforms.

  6. @Roy

    Are you just trying to be stupid or do you always like to jump up and bash companies that have better products just because you feel it’s the cool thing to do?

    By the way Mac/Apple/OS X doesn’t really suck, but I’d be glad to listen to why you think it does.

  7. @Anti-Roy

    Are you just trying to be stupid or do you always like to jump up and cause giant fanboy wars over stupid products just because you feel personally insulted when someone pays out on Apple?

    Honestly. I hate Apple because they lie to consumers, and have a market based on looks and exclusivity. But that doesn’t mean I want to have a flame war where I have to defend Microsoft or Linux. I just choose to avoid liars.

  8. Yes, now that’s iWork is growing and the competition in office suites is heating up, MS should drop Office for the Mac if they want to make a dent in Apple’s growing marketshare…of course it would be evil but I’m saying what MS should do for their benefit. Look at Apple, they’ve kept the Mac platform attractive by keeping their real cream Mac-only – iLife, iWork, Aperture, Final Cut Pro, Logic, LiveType, iChat and so on. So many people would love to see an iChat or iLife on Windows, but Apple won’t.

  9. actually i wouldn’t mind a Windows version of Aperture. in my experience, Lightroom performance has been less than stellar.

    is there a 64-bit version of Lightroom?

  10. @mrmckeb&Anti-Roy

    Cool Name by the way. πŸ™‚

    Oh, and probably just stupid but you never know.

    I know Office 2007 runs on XP (I actually used it for a while there before switching to Vista) but I still don’t get Office for Mac though.

    Again, my opinion is that this specific non Microsoft company and its products (phew) are not on par with other products out there and I would never purchase them. I did not want to start a flame war or anything (and I do realize there are a lot of people who like it like I mentioned above).
    But since I have been reading this great blog for a while now (and I enjoy doing that), I thought of expressing my opinion for a change and asking a question.

    So again, why on earth would a company create products for its main competitor, especially when the other company does not miss a chance of attacking it.
    From a business sense, this is just stupid.

    If I was the product manager for Office in Microsoft, I would let the Macs run Open Office and suffer.(By the way, exactly like they are not doing a Linux version specifically for this reason).

    Cheers and stay calm,

    Roy

  11. @Roy: First of all: Microsoft wants to sell software, not PCs. They also sell 10% of their Vista licenses (non-OEM) to Mac users. Then, there is maybe a treaty between Microsoft and Apple to exchange patents which forces MS to develop an Office suite for the Mac.

    Apple isn’t the biggest competitor here. It’s Google. Apple is a hardware company in the first place.

    Microsoft was always the biggest software developer for Apple but even the newest Office for Mac isn’t as powerfull as the Windows version. A funny detail by the way: Microsoft owns more Apple stocks than Steve Jobs πŸ™‚

  12. The business sense in this is very simple: Microsoft doesn’t make its money selling Windows.

    They make money selling their business and productivity software – Windows is just a platform for these to work on.

    Making their office suite available on macs serve one very important purpose in this: keeping Microsoft Office the de facto standard in the world of office suites. Whoever owns the standard, owns the market. Simple as that.

    The only reason MS Office isn’t available on Linux is that there is no business sense in spending millions on making an office suite for a system that still has a limited spread in the desktop market and is usually crowded with suspender-wearing, cranky old “open source” people who don’t like paying for software.

  13. Au contraire, Microsoft makes plenty of money selling Windows. More, in fact, than Win Office and Mac Office put together. Also, Microsoft no longer owns Apple stock — it sold off all of it, at a nice profit (tiny compared to the profit they could’ve made if they’d held onto it until after the iPod came out).

    Mac Office serves a number of purposes: (1) It is profitable, and there’s no good reason to just throw money away. (2) It is in Microsoft’s interests to ensure the vitality of Mac OS, since it holds convenient anti-antitrust properties. Read some of the remedy testimony in US v. Microsoft — there are lots of cases where the Microsoft lawyers point to a feature in Mac OS and says, “If it’s OK for them to bundle it into Mac OS, why are we prohibited from bundling it into Windows?”

    If you’ve gotten used to Win Office 2007, you’ll be shocked by how bad Mac Office 2008 is, and I don’t mean just that it lacks the Ribbon. (Mac OS’s “one menu bar for the entire PC” wouldn’t mesh all that well with the Ribbon anyway …) Many important features haven’t been ported over — the new Equation Editor, the new PivotTables, etc. This makes for a very frustrating conversion experience. I know a number of Mac users who run Win Office 2007 using Parallels because they couldn’t stand Mac Office.

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