I am, as has been discussed ad nausium previously, a Mac person.

I have to use windows along with the Macs at work and we have a Fujitsu Seimens PC laptop at home we call MountFuji because it is so huge. We bought it for the kids to use when doing their school course work (although they normally use wifey’s Mac PowerBook to their homework as they feel it just works better). I get the cold sweats when I get near MountFuji as its normally to run Microsoft Update again – and again – and again.

You can therefore understand I was a liitle on edge when I drove about 90 miles around the M25 Orbital motorway on Tuesday, to go to the UK Offices of the (other) evil empire, Microsoft Inc.
I was attending a special event for the system administrators and IT people from their Enterprise Print and Publishing sector, a presentation and conference call the Mac business unit in Seattle regarding some as yet unreleased software products that we (as large customers) have the skinny on well in advance for “planning” reasons, something IMHO Apple should do. Say what you like about MS (and I generally do), but they really get the enterprise thing.

I am sure it was under some kind of NDA (these things usually are) so to prevent my lardy arse from being sued, I won’t mention anything discussed about future products.

I arrived a little too early and so sat in the entrance area awaiting the call for check-in. The wind, which didn’t seem that bad while I was outside, whistled through the automatic revolving doors like I was in some bone chilling Transylvanian castle. I had an ill feeling, like I was awaiting Vlad the impaler, or worse Billy G. himself, to come and take my soul any minute.

The presentation was a bit of a feeding frenzy by the predominantly Mac biased crowd and I sometimes felt a little sorry for the guys from MS, they were trying really hard to keep it all together and politic.

They said to the horde they had gathered together, that they didn’t want to sell Windows and to keep it positive about Macs, but I don’t think they really understood their audience very well and looked a little shocked when dissent about certain products kicked off.

This wasn’t helped of course by a slide presentation depicting all Mac users as home users and a tiny market share, and the fact that none of the MS guys had apparently used a Mac before (they admitted this), despite what their Office:Mac T-Shirts might of implied.

Entourage 2004 took the worst beating from us of course, because although its actually a good e-mail/PIM – if you are a general schmo user who just connects to an IMAP or POP server, the corporate IT staff, like us, still remember Outlook 2001. After Outlook 2001, Entourage was always going to be a hard sell. Outlook 2001 was a feature rich (in comparison to Entourage anyway) IMAP client that made the Mac OS 9 users part of an enterprise email and calendar community on Exchange campuses.

We saw Entourage as a betrayal to the Mac faithful that work in these environments, we had functionality taken away just when we needed it most, when we were migrating to OS X and wanted it all to go smoothly.

It was of course a deliberate move by Microsoft for several reasons. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, MS see the Mac marketplace as being ‘merely’ home users. Mac OS 9 users had an early Entourage client, Outlook Express and something called Mail and News, all were POP and IMAP clients that were targeted at home/SoHo users who get their mail from a service provider. The enterprise customers were small potatoes in comparison statistically. Entourage 2004 was written with these Home/SoHo users in mind, and it will continue to be so in the forceable future. Exchange communication is still seen as an “also” feature to appease the corporates who have to include a few Mac workstations.

This is where the second reason and my conspiracy brain comes in. Microsoft is not a charitable institution (despite Mr Gates’ foundation’s work), it is a business with shareholders. The companies only purpose for existence is to make money for those shareholders in whatever way it can legally (just) perform.

MS’ primary cash cow is of course Windows and the marketplace it has developed around it, the applications, servers services, peripherals, consultancy etc, etc.- all about Windows, reliant on Windows or interacts with Windows. It is in Microsoft’s and their shareholders interest to make Windows the platform of choice for everyone on the planet, especially every corporate enterprise on the planet because they buy the most, renew the most often and accessorise the most with software and peripherals.

MS see we Mac people as ‘these bunch of outsiders that use another operating system called Mac OS and that will not budge from their delusion (not using Windows). So that MS can have a piece of our pie as well, the Mac BU are allowed to continue to produce Office etc. for Mac. But always remember, MS is all about the Windows platform, so do you really think it is in MS’ best interest to make products for another platform that are competitive with the ones for Windows? Of course not. It just isn’t good business to do so. Make them OK, yes. Make them file compatible with the file formats used on the Windows products, yes because that provides an incentive to buy them in a Windows world where everyone wants to talk to each other, but to compete with the Windows versions, to even dare to make the Windows versions look bad, no that just wouldn’t be logical.

We are therefore left with a feature controlled software suite that is almost, but never quite going to be as good as the Windows version of the software. Subtly bits are left out and emphasis is placed on other functions. Meanwhile our hosts at Microsoft dutifully do their job of selling their products and sing its praises like we should be glad they still talk to us.

So we had the meeting and all agreed it was good to talk, I have offered (a I did previously) to host a forum where everyone can continue to share with the group and I hope the guys at MS (who seemed decent chaps actually) will propagate the address because we are a useful and powerful bunch of people to get together.

I haven’t had time of course to mention the guy who’s AD integration product was shot down in flames or the great, if rushed, presentaion by the lady representing Parallels – a lesson not to judge a book by its cover there I think. Enough there for another posting some day.

Vlad (or Bill) didn’t of course make a showing and it ended with a very pleasant slice or two of pepperoni pizza and a 140 mile journey back around the M25 (with detour via the M26 I would rather not talk about – Smeary windscreen, artic. lorry, outside lane at 80mph, say no more).