I recently purchased an iMac at work for a project that I was working on. The first thing I did was use Bootcamp so I could dual-boot with Windows 7, and for the most part never touched OS X. Then I ended up with a copy of Office 2008, and figured, “Let’s see what all the fuss is about”. I wiped my Windows partition, installed Office 2008, and told myself I’d try to go a full month with just OS X.
It’s been just over two weeks, and I’m finished with it. I’m going to install Vista on a VirtualBox VM and load up Office 2007.
The deal breaker? Entourage 2008. Why? Well, lots of reasons, actually.
To start off with, unless you install the Web Services Edition Update, say ‘bye-bye!’ to things like your To Do list and easy calendar syncing. Do you use Distributions Lists that are stored on your Exchange Server? Too bad! Entourage can’t sync them, so you’ll have to recreate them all by hand on your local system! Want a different signature for your email replies? Tough luck!
Aside from the lack of support for basic functions that Outlook has had for ages, there are also a plethora of usability issues. Randomly, Entourage will decide that dragging-and-dropping isn’t hip anymore and won’t let me move emails around unless I reboot the computer. A simple close/reopen isn’t good enough it seems. If I try to add an appointment to my Calender on the Exchange Server, there’s a 50/50 chance of it actually showing up after saving it.
The MythBusters may have proved that you can polish shit, but in the end, it’s still shit. Hopefully the announced Outlook 2010 for Mac will be a near-clone of the Windows version and the Mac BU at Microsoft burns the Entourage source code at the release party.
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