Mac Gains Pay Off for Redmond as Office Flies Off Shelves

In an effort to fix the most pressing issues found by customers of Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Office 2008 for Mac, Microsoft's Macintosh business unit (Mac BU) has released the applications' first service pack (SP1). At the same time, it's touting the its Apple-friendly office suite's high sales figures.

Office 2008 for Mac launched at the Macworld Expo 2008 in January, and the Redmond-based software maker said sales have been soaring so high that it's now selling faster than any previous version of Office for Mac in the past 19 years.

"The response has been amazing -- since we launched in January, the velocity of sales for Office 2008 is nearly three times what we saw after the launch of Office 2004," noted Craig Eisler, general manager of the Mac BU at Microsoft.

"As we set our course for future versions, we are working closely with customers and will also expand our staff to ensure that Office for Mac remains the most powerful and compatible productivity suite for Mac customers," he added.

Apple's Gain Is Mac BU's Gain

It's been about four years since Microsoft released the previous version of Office for Mac, so some of the rapid sales can be attributed to pent up demand. Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) iWork suite, however, has been competing and picking up market share as well.

Regardless, a large factor contributing to Office for Mac's sales certainly lies in Apple's renewed success at selling Macs over the last few years.

"Office 2008 for Mac is selling three times faster than the last version, and that's a legacy of the fact that Apple is selling a lot more Macs than it did four years ago," Matt Rosoff, an analyst for Directions on Microsoft, told MacNewsWorld.

"So in some sense, while Microsoft competes with Apple in the operating system area, when Apple does well, Microsoft also benefits by selling more copies of Office," he added.

The Future

The Mac BU also revealed it will bring back Visual Basic Applications (VBA) language support to the next version of Office for Mac.

Although the Mac BU increased support in Office 2008 with alternate scripting tools such as Automator and AppleScript -- and also worked with MacTech Magazine to create a reference guide -- the Mac BU team says it recognizes that VBA-language support is important to some customers who want to share macros between PCs and Macs.

The Mac BU

While the Mac BU is definitely part of Microsoft, Directions on Microsoft's Rosoff noted, it doesn't operate out of the Windows group. It's more closely aligned with Microsoft's entertainment and devices unit, "but basically it's part of consumer software," he said. "That's a business unit that works on things like Money, Encarta and some of the Microsoft hardware products, things like Surface and automotive, so a lot of consumer technologies come out of the that group, and that's how they view Office for Mac," he explained.

Still, Microsoft works to ensure that Office for Mac works with other Microsoft products, he noted, particularly Exchange and Communications Server, to make it more useful for enterprise customers that have some Macs deployed.

"It's a good business for Microsoft," Rosoff said. "In terms of revenue, it's not a huge amount for a company like Microsoft, but it's a profitable business, they're committed to it -- they've got a decent sized team working on it and they have been for a long time."

Microsoft said it has more than 200 full-time Mac product experts working in the Mac BU.

The Here and Now

Office 2008 for Mac SP1 features suite-wide updates for increased stability, increased security and overall performance improvements, Microsoft said, in addition application-specific updates, including the following:

• Microsoft Office Excel
  • Compatibility: Improved compatibility with files exchanged between Excel 2008 for Mac and Excel 2003 and Excel 2007 for Windows
  • Custom Error Bars: Restored formatting option on the Error Bars panel for data series
  • Printing: More reliable printing for elements on Excel 2008 workbooks

• Microsoft Entourage
  • Calendar: Significant enhancements to improve calendar view and all-day reminders with reoccurrence
  • Exchange Server support: Overall improvement to synchronization support, including removing attachments from Exchange Server messages and synchronizing to the server, as well as support for editing the contents of Exchange Server messages via AppleScript and synchronizing the changes to the server
  • E-mail images: Ability to send and view images in Entourage from third-party tools

• Microsoft Office Word
  • Printing: Improved accuracy when orienting tables with cell shading
  • Document map: Improved reliability and responsiveness to select items
  • Notebook layout: Updated formatting, recording status and a variety of display options

• Microsoft Office PowerPoint
  • Printing: Improvements to eliminate crashing when printing documents to high-dpi printers and increased overall printing speed by 10 times on some large presentations
  • Mobile viewing: Ability to view Mac .PPTX files on Windows Mobile phones
  • AppleScript: Ability to use the PowerPoint selection object in AppleScript to implement custom scripts that operate on the current selection in PowerPoint

The update is downloadable from Microsoft and is also available from Microsoft Auto Update.