Re: Word 2008 - does it do right-to-left text

Hi John:

We have to be careful to constrain ourselves to the facts here, otherwise we
just set Phillip off again :-)

Changing text direction is such a fundamental change in an application that
it must be designed in from the ground up. The fact that Apple has finally
released full support for RTL means that other vendors can "begin" to do
that design work.

My understanding is that Nissus and Mellel wrote their own right-to-left
routines because the Apple ones didn't work. And by doing so, I am sure
they improved their sales by 200 or 300 per cent. If Microsoft were to do
the same thing for Mac Office, they could expect to improve Office sales by
0.033 per cent.

The fact that we WANT them to do that does not alter the fact that the board
of directors might well go to jail if they approved the project :-)

Of course, as an IT Manager, you already know the following, but I will
include it here to avoid setting Phillip off :-) We need to be careful of
the term "re-write" when applied to a piece of software with 30 million
lines of code in it :-) Under those conditions, the objective becomes "Do
everything possible to AVOID re-writing it." Otherwise, you go broke.

The very clear direction from on high for Office 2008 will be something like
"Take Windows Office 2007, remove the products that are too hard, remove the
features that are not needed on the Mac, then make as few changes as
possible to get the rest of it to simply 'work'"

So: If Apple RTL support is now sufficiently complete that Microsoft can
simply unhook the Windows RTL support module from Office 2008 and hook up
the OS X one, then OF COURSE they will do it. It might get them 100,000 new
sales. Some of them to Al Quaida and the Israeli government. But if we're
talking about a team of 100 developers working through every module, every
dialogue box, every line of code that puts something on the screen and
changing the way it operates to fit in with Apple's RTL support, then it's
not going to happen. There's not enough sales to fund it.

I wonder if the same enthusiasm will be evident at Apple, which just
announced a mobile phone without enough rows on the keyboard to support
accented characters, let alone RTL languages...

I richly enjoyed the Apple marketing slogan "Think Different". But the user
base for which Microsoft Office was made saw it as a "Warning Label" and
recoiled in horror. I think Apple quickly understood that it made a
horrible mistake there, and jumped back itself pretty quickly. But it will
take a few years for their user base to come on board. On the other hand, I
do enjoy the PC with a cold vs Mac adds currently running. I'm typing this
in the Mac while the latest PC sits on the desk beside me hacking and
spluttering while I fill it up with Penicillin :-)

I don't know why you believe that Microsoft Office does not support ODI. It
already does, along with any other XML-based format for which you possess a
DTD and a Transform. The only change forthcoming is a translator to enable
users to convert between the two.

I will agree that Messenger for Mac is deliberately crippled :-) Of course
it is. And it will stay that way until Apple allows it into .Mac and AOL
allows it into AIM. Right after that, expect it to suddenly uncripple
itself.

After spending some time with Windows Media Player 11, I have decided that
it's not a bad product. It has some nice bells and whistles that iTunes
doesn't offer.

I think there is one reason I can give you to spend your money on Office
2008. The Open XML file format. If I said to you "You will get no more
corrupt documents, and no more interchange with Windows problems" I think
you would consider it. You may wait to see what they really deliver: but I
still think you'll grab your checkbook.

Of course, I may be wrong. If Mellel and Nissus Writer will do all that
your users need, you could save yourself a bundle. But few companies in my
experience have needs that limited.

Cheers

On 15/1/07 11:45 PM, in article C1D127E9.1A2C5%john.lockwood@xxxxxxxxxxx,
"John Lockwood" <john.lockwood@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 12/1/07 14:19, in article C1CDE419.58F15%john@xxxxxxxxxxx, "John McGhie
[MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]" <john@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi John:

Now, if Steve Jobs were to show Microsoft his design specification for
Pages, Microsoft may be a little more forthcoming about the feature set for
Word 2008 :-)

While we wait to find out, I invite you to reflect on this:

Word does right-to-left perfectly on the PC, and Mac Word is essentially a
port of the PC code. So the copy of Word you are using right now already
contains right-to-left support.

It's not working. It's disabled. Because something is missing. I leave
you to ponder what it is that might be missing, and which company should
have supplied it by now :-)

This is the excuse that Microsoft have been using for years and initially
was a VALID excuse in that Mac OS X prior to Jaguar didn't really do
right-to-left at all, Jaguar did it poorly but Panther fairly well and Tiger
does it perfectly.

This is evidenced by the multiplicity of other word processors for the Mac
which DO support right-to-left text (e.g. Mellel see
http://www.redlers.com/mellelmultilingual.html and Nisus Writer see
http://www.nisus.com/Express/ ).

So as I stated Microsoft are having to re-write Word anyway, and no longer
have an excuse for not adding this feature. Any failure to do so would in my
opinion reflect a DELIBERATE decision to [not] do so (i.e. to deliberately
continue to disadvantage Mac users).

The Israeli government has already practically declared war once before over
this issue (see http://www.macobserver.com/article/2003/10/15.4.shtml ), I
am surprised the Arabic world has not similarly declared a Jihad against
Microsoft over this! After all several Arabic publications use Macs
including Al Jazeera! See http://www.ameinfo.com/102511.html

Note: NeoOffice also supports right-to-left text, it will very soon [far,
far sooner than Microsoft] support Open XML files, and it will also support
some VBA in its spread*** module whereas Excel 2008 will not. Its also
ALREADY available as a native Intel version.

It is incredible that Microsoft keep boasting they have the biggest team of
Mac developers outside Apple and yet produce so very few products [the
number of which continues to shrink] and not even particularly good products
either.

Ultimately Microsoft's patently deliberate crippling of their Mac software
is I feel counter-productive. A Mac user will look at their obviously
crippled products (e.g. MS Messenger) and think - Microsoft obviously are
not very good at writing software its a good thing I am not using Windows as
that must be crap as well. A Windows user can look at iTunes on Windows and
see a full quality non crippled application that is far easier to use than
WMP and has more features than WMP. They can then think, blimey if that's
how good their free software is for Windows imagine how good the rest of
their software for their own operating system must be. Hence the
[increasing] number of switchers to the Mac.

I would also say that historically having a GOOD cross-platform offering has
been a major reason for several software products succeeding over others
which did not (e.g. Quicken vs. MS Money, Excel vs. Lotus 123). This is one
of the main reasons Office succeeded in the first place and quite possibly
why iTunes is succeeding now. This is a lesson Microsoft have clearly
forgotten and the result will likely be far fewer sales of Office 2008
upgrades than Microsoft presumably expect. I as an IT Manager certainly see
no justification so far for spending tens of thousands of dollars upgrading
all our users.


--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <john@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Business Analyst, Consultant
Technical Writer.
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

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