From: Ebbe Altberg
Sent: Thursday, February 12, 1998 11:42 AM
To: Macintosh BU Program Managers; Macintosh BU Managers
Subject: MacOffice 2K
I started to think about stuff that I feel are important for us to focus
on for our next release. This is a high level list of areas to get some
thoughts and discussions going. Things are not listed in any particular
order here. VVhat key things are missing? What is wrong? What do you
think? Never mind the 2K. I just don’t have a good name for this thing.
ebbe
Things to start thinking about for next version
..
ClarisWorks
Our biggest competitor. We should remove all reasons anybody might have
for sticking with this product rather than upgrade to Office. What
features do we need to steal? What scenarios do we need to improve to
make us a superset. Conversion needs to be simple obviously. Do we want
to be able to switch to ClarisWorks UI or have special ClarisWorks Help
that tell users how to deal, kind of like WordPerfect Help we had in
Word6 for Windows?
..
UI
We need to follow Apple to a large degree, but also push Apple to make
improvements we need. I think we should alo leverage the Assistant,
Wizards, and more to make people feel that we’re friendlier and easier.
Less complex where possible. Simplify.
System
Need to pick up key features added by Apple. We get lots of bonus points
for supporting their technologies. Need to be selective and careful as
it is not all worthwhile.
Education
Key market for Apple. This is where they make the majority of their
sales. What can we do to get a big chunk of this marked? What can we do
to make them willing to spend money on Office when they have ClarisWorks
already for free? What scenarios are important to teachers and students.
Ease of Use and TCO are key, but we should also do specific work to
target key scenarios that speak to these users.
Small Business, Publishing, Home
Other pockets of Apple users. We need to focus more on these users
rather than the LORG customers Office9 is targeting in general. This is
why we will focus more on Ease of Use, but we need to do this with these
users in mind. Do we need to provide some tools to deal with digital
imaging, scanners, cameras? Party invitations. Family albums. Inventory.
Customer contact management. Things Publisher, Home titles, and Small
Business pack on Windows can do. These types of scenarios need to be
targeted.
Short term issues
..
ClarisWorks
What Can we do shortly after we ship to make it more obvious and easier
for people to migrate to Office98? Provide converters would be key.
FileMaker
What can we do short term as value add to promote interoperability with
FileMaker. We should provide value shortly after we’ve shipped so that
we can reduce the "ClarisWorks has a database" and "why don’t you
provide Access" problems.
..
HTML Help
Both Win and Apple are implementing this stuff and Office9 will take
advantage of it. How can we influence Apple to make the same
implementation, or maybe better, so that we don’t have to deal with
random differences and reduce the need for us to provide stuff here.
..
Some things that are not important
.. Would be nice to fix VB memory problems, but I don’t see the need for
any major investment
here ..
http://edge-op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/2000/PX02842.pdf
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court documents in the case of Comes v. Microsoft.
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