Microsoft announced Thursday that the next edition of Microsoft Office for Mac will be released in late 2010. The new edition of the venerable office suite will include Outlook for Mac, a new application that will replace the Entourage.
“We’ll bring forward all the functionality from the Entourage Web Services Edition, including public folders, managed folders, and category syncing, but with Outlook we’re going even further and building a whole new application,” said Microsoft Mac Business Unit general manager Eric Wilfrid.
Wilfrid said that Microsoft will create Outlook for Mac using Apple’s modern Cocoa development frameworks, rather than the older Carbon system used by previous Office applications because of their legacy of having been originally developed for the Classic Mac OS.
This is great news all the way around.
It’s good news for Apple in that many businesses that already are married to Exchange and Outlook have one less reason to ignore the Mac. By having Outlook running on OS X, the Mac becomes much more attractive to business customers.
Sure, 10.6 includes built-in Exchange support, but Outlook is far more familiar to old PC users than Mail, Address Book and iCal, and migrating people away from Outlook to these three applications is painful. Hopefully migrating from Outlook on the PC to the Mac will be much easier, making the entire move from the PC to the Mac much smoother all around.
It’s good for Microsoft for several reasons as well. They will be able to continue making money off of Exchange licenses, even if that license is being used for someone on the Mac. They will still make money on Office for Mac licenses as well.
I think this marks a shift in thinking for Redmond. I think Microsoft knows that more companies are moving to the Mac, and they’ve responded well by opening their flagship enterprise product to all computer users — not just those running Windows. In the past, they’ve tried to draw a line in the sand between PCs and Macs with Office — different versions, different applications and different features that usually left the Mac looking a little wimpy. Yes, the PC version of Office still includes things like Access and Publisher that aren’t on the Mac (FileMaker and Pages make for decent competitors, though), but now the biggest difference — Outlook — isn’t an issue anymore.
Hopefully this won’t be a big deal:
Wilfrid emphasized that while Outlook for Mac won’t be a feature-for-feature match with Outlook on Windows, Outlook for Mac will be extremely compatible. “Outlook for Mac and Outlook for Windows work great together, and work great in an Exchange environment,” he said.
It can’t be worse then Entourage.