Why Microsoft Office 2008 is going to be Office's Vista

I have written about this before, but I believe that Office 2008 is going to fail. After thinking about it some more and re-reading the Apple Insider series, I have come up with a new set of reasons why it is going to fail.

1. Not Mac like enough. I wrote it before, and I will write it again: Office 2008 is not enough like Office 2004 or other mac applications to get the benefit of a consistent user interface. Even inside of the four office apps there is not a consistent user interface; Word, PowerPoint and Excel use nonstandard toolbars while Entourage uses a normal Mac toolbar.
2. Different for the sake of being different. This was Vista's problem, it did not have enough in common with XP, so users chose something they were familiar with. Sure, you could take time to learn it, but to me the interface seems a little jarring each time I compare it to a normal Mac app
3. Looks too much like Vista. I know this is a repeat of the first one, but seriously, this takes too many of it interface cues from Vista and not enough from Leopard or Tiger. The toolbars, the overlays, and the widgets in general are just too "glassy". And there is a lot of unnecessary work being done too: the re-implementing of a lot of Carbon widgets to look more like Vista. I think Office v. X looked more Mac-like, and that people are going to stick with Office 2004, as it fits a bit better into the Mac look.

I think that Microsoft mainly implemented a complex look for Office (Windows and Mac) to make it harder for Open Source projects to look good by comparison. Gloss and transparency coat the proprietary implementation, while the Open Source one looks like the last version. Seriously, Office customers might move to OpenOffice if they are not able to understand the new UI and want something familiar.

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