Q&A: Office:Mac and "Mac-like"

I got this question via the open question thread:

Would you say that the MacBU is focused on delivering a "Mac-like" Office experience?

I would say that we're focused on delivering the best productivity applications for the Mac.

There's no great definition for "Mac-like". Apple's Human Interface Guidelines go some way towards defining that, but they certainly don't go all the way. It's possible to follow the HIG and create an application that doesn't feel like it's a Mac app at all. Additionally, the HIG is usually slow to be updated and the look defined by the HIG can be pretty dated -- look how long it took them to remove the Panther UI or brushed metal.

As a result, Mac-like is often "I know it when I see it", but definitions of Mac-like change from person to person. Some people consider iTunes to be the canonical Mac-like app, but iTunes often strays far from the HIG when it suits their purposes. That's not a criticism: that shows that the HIG is a set of guidelines, and straying from them doesn't result in a bad, unusable, or non-Mac-like experience.

Aside from the question of what it means to be Mac-like, there are plenty of people who don't want a Mac-like experience. We get many requests from people who just want us to deliver Office for Windows, except running natively on their Mac. They don't want the user experience to differ in any way at all: all commands the same, all keyboard shortcuts the same, every single pixel the same. Now, we don't think that it's the right thing to do, but there is absolutely a pull from some segment of our user audience to not bother with Mac-like.

I also think that it's easy to have a UI that's viewed as more Mac-like when there's no history behind the product. Take PowerPoint: it's more than 20 years old. With 20+ years of organic growth, managing the user experience is complex. Starting from scratch, and being able to learn from everything that has happened in the past 20 years, means that you have opportunities that aren't available to an application with an existing user base of millions who have strong expectations.