MS Office 2010 Beta

I am like, Forgive me Steve* for I have sinned. What did you do, my son? sez Steve... Well, Steve, I went out to test the Evil Empire's Office 2010 beta. Steve's like: Burn to hell, pathetic cheat! You see, folks, I found out that Microsoft have made their 2010 Office beta available to the miserable Windows aficionados (that is, almost the entire 6.7B people living on the planet), and I said to myself, what else have you got to do this Sunday, kid? Let's go test it. Of course, many of you already know by now that I usually run Windows on a Mac, with the specs you see hereunder. Of course I run Windows 7 under Parallels 5.

First time I launched Word after the Office package install (download size almost 700 MB and installation went impeccably smooth) I kinda thought to myself... 'Shoot, that's fokkin' quick'! Tried again and it came out even quicker (that's normal, as it keeps many of its libs in mem even after you close down the app). Launched Excel, lightning fast, some 1.7 secs. Access didn't even have the time to display the launch title window... Publisher, same thing. Word took below 4 secs and the rest less than 2 secs. I even believe Access was a subsecond launch. Wow!

I then decided to test the same on 2008 Office for Mac. Word was almost as fast as the 2010 Word (pretty cool, eh?). But Excel and Powerpoint were 50 to 80% slower than the 2010 Office. Finally, for kicks, I launched my iWork apps, Mac's native, but not in 64 bit yet. Well, all three of them, Pages, Keynote and Numbers, needed 2 to 4 times longer launch times.

I wanted to share this with you, folks, so I've  Screenflown it into a MOV file and sent it to YT... enjoy the clip above. Every time I launched an Office app, I added a text label in Screenflow (white type on black background) to appear in the clip with the app's name on it. When the launch completes, label disappears. Check it out...

What do we learn from that? Obviously we learn that,

1. First, the best boxes to run Windows apps are Macs.
2. Second, MS Office 2010 seems to fly supersonic, at least at launch time (and further too, as far as I was able to test)
3. Third, other than launch times, little I saw in terms of new functionality that could blow your socks off. On the contrary, it remains quite a menu driven and configuration sprawl intensive package. Some GUI pop-ups reminded me of Windows 95 and 3.11. When are the MonkeyBoy kiddos ever gonna learn?

Nevertheless, Steve, I reckon, after Apple launches the 64 bit iWork, all what I said above will be yesterday's news. Whatever. I just wanted you to know... Even better, for all of you folks out there who never used a Mac, prepare for a lightning fast and orgasmic experience on your miserable Wintel boxes when Office 2010 gets commercial.

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* Obviously, this is Jobs, not fokkin' Ballmer!