Microsoft Bringing Outlook To Mac: Is This Good News or Bad?

Leander Kahney ()

outlook2007_logo_lgOutlook is coming to the Mac, Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit said on Thursday. The next version of Office for Mac will replace Entourage for Mac with a new application – Outlook for Mac.

Is this good news or bad? I hate Entourage, but I hated Outlook on Windows even more when I had to use a PC. In fact, Outlook is my second-most hated program of all time, right behind Lotus Notes.

Outlook for Mac will be included in Office 2010 for Mac, which Microsoft said will be ready for the holidays next year. (Apple has promised better Exchange support in Snow Leopard. It’s likely that Microsoft announced Outlook so far in advance to discourage current Entourage users from switching to the new Exchange-compatible version of Apple Mail coming in Snow Leopard).

It will include:

* A new database and Exchange protocol. Database supports Time Machine backups and Spotlight searching — finally!!!!

* Better cross-platform collaboration and calendering.

* Built from the ground up in Cocoa to offer better performance, better OS X integration, and get this, “make Outlook beautiful,” said said Eric Wilfrid, general manager for the MacBU.

No word on whether Outlook for Mac will be compatible with PST files exported from Windows versions of Outlook, which are a bear to import into other email programs.

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Meanwhile, Microsoft is reducing the number of versions of Office it offers from three to two. Alongside the Standard Edition, it is now offering Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Business Edition, which bundles Entourage Web Services Edition and Microsoft Document Connection for Mac.

It will be sold alongside the current Standard Edition for the same price: $399, or $239 to upgrade. It is available to some customers today as a download or on Sept. 15. in shrinkwrap.

Link to Microsoft’s press release.

13 comments »

About the author

Leander Kahney

is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac, and author of three books about technology culture: Inside Steve’s Brain, the New York Times bestseller about Steve Jobs; Cult of Mac; and Cult of iPod. Leander has written for Wired, MacWeek, Scientific American, and The Guardian in London. Follow Leander on Twitter @lkahney and Facebook.

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  • Al Christensen

    I’m an independent contractor with a group that keeps complaining I don’t have Outlook so they can send me all their scheduling stuff. So it would be nice if there were some app that would serve that purpose without all the other crap. Or maybe it’s just better to shrug and apologize.

  • http://stevec.us Steve Chambers

    While I would tend to agree that Outlook is one of the most horrendous and difficult and non-intuitive applications on ANY platform. This is a BIG deal.

    I have to support Outlook for a living so I am well aware of it’s problems, idiosyncrasies and foibles. But the fact of the matter is there is little that the Mac-only using member of many corporations want and need is an Outlook client that is not a bastardized version of a marginally useful subset of a few mostly-working features of the Windows Outlook client. I’m looking at you Entourage.

    I spent an hour at a bar waiting for someone else when a fellow patron commented on my iPhone and we started talking about it, Macs vs. PCs and how much he just thought Outlook was the best thing ever.

    As much as we Mac cognoscenti would like to think we have the inside track on usability many people (large corporate IT organizations included) think that Outlook is not only Perfectly Acceptable, but The Absolute Best Solution For Our Email/Calendar/Etc Needs.

    So, yes, Outlook is (Sorry Mr. Jobs) also a big bag of hurt. But it is a welcome and vitally necessary bag for many Mac users (corporate or otherwise) who LIKE the beast and could actually help the adoption of Macs in environments where it has been shunned for the reason that it cant FULLY participate in corporate email and calendaring.

    Me, I’ll just stick with mail.app and iCal

  • Mike

    Coincidence? Apple announced native Exchange Server support integration with the Apple Mail application in Snow Leopard. Everyone knows Entourage has features missing that are in Outlook but Microsoft never cared to address those issues. Now suddenly they announce Outlook is coming back for the Mac. Do you think perhaps Microsoft wants to keep people hooked into using Office and Outlook and could be concerned that people will stop using Entourage/Outlook in favor of Apple mail and other applications?

  • Boruce Lee

    I just wish they will make the rest of Mac Office look/behave like Windows Office. I hate all the floating windows and formatting palette. Office 2007 is the only reason I have Parallels installed on my Mac.

  • Gazoobee

    Entourage is so thoroughly useless and so completely incompatible with anything that we have just successfully moved all of our users onto Mail, even though it’s a pain in the bum because they have to use iCal for calendars and iCal doesn’t support things like Zimbra (or much of anything). Entourage is just *that* bad that our users were willing to ditch it for *anything* that actually worked.

    Who steals users from who at this point, will come down to whether iCal actually integrates with anything in the near future, and how well the new Outlook client is crafted.

    Remember this *is* Microsoft, and they are basically building it from the ground up. What are the odds that this puppy actually works out of the box in version 1.0? Pretty slim it seems to me.

  • http://www.apple.com Shashank

    I have to agree with Boruce Lee

    And Outlook is actually a fantastic program and a cornerstone of productivity. Why would you be against outlook? It’s basically mail, calendar, and address book rolled into one.

  • http://www.mr63.com mark

    By the time that the next Microsoft Office is released have we not all switched to Open Office? So why buy something for one item?

    Maybe here lies a challenges for the Open Office group to develop and integrate an application that does everything you want from Outlook but does not provide it today nor will it be tomorrow due to the complexity of MS.

  • Bill

    Wow, I like Entourage. It’s set up with Exchanged went a lot better than Outlook 2007 on my PC, which refused to sync after multiple attempts. I copy and pasted the info, so it was not a typo error. After several tries, Outlook finally synced with Exchange. However, it synced first try with Entourage, again, copy and pasting the set up. It’s my all-in-one PIM for calendar, mail. notes and addresses, although notes will not sync. Now. I’m talking about 2004 version. 2008 is still in the box. I did not wish to screw up a well functioning app by updating. Good thing it was a free update from Microsoft’s Black Friday sale.

  • Janice P.

    It took Microsoft 8 years to decide to go back to Outlook for Mac?

    Outlook 2001 still ran faster than Entourage 2004 while running classic on top of Tiger. Entourage 2008 had even more weird/unstable cached database crap than 2004, however it was faster than Outlook 2007. Hopefully Microsoft gets it right this time. In the mean time I prefer web interface of gmail over the slow memory hog that is Outlook, so I have no reason to ever buy any future replacements for home systems anyway.

  • http://www.cyclelogicpress.com Partners in Grime

    Apple is making some great compatibility strides with Snow Leopard.

  • Czar

    Apple is making huge stride in comparison to Microsoft. Microsoft is the computer world’s huge bag of hurt.

    When i outgrow my Mac’s I give them to my family members so they never call me about their computer giving them problems.

  • D9

    Outlook for Mac (and VBA coming back!) is good in that people needing such “confidence builders” for their IT managers can now further advance using Macs in Windows-centric environments.

    The irony here is that one division in Microsoft (Business Division) through its licensing of ActiveSync to Apple’s Snow Leopard OS has threatened another division’s product (MacBU). As stated in the article, MacBU had to say something in fear of losing out to Apple’s own offerings as well as any other alternatives that pop up in the next 12 months. Yet all the while, it now puts Office for Mac 2008 in a lame duck position.

  • SJK

    Outlook is NOT horrendous, difficult or non-intuitive. For my day job using a PC, I loved it, my productivity was due in a large part to outlook until I was forced to switch to Lotus Notes, which is horrendous, difficult, non-intuitive and much more.

    This is also a another step in a lot of organizations agreeing to let Macs into the workplace. Bring it on!