The Microsoft Mac Business Unit (or MBU) has been working hard to provide the next version of Microsoft Office for the new Intel macs. You can see the details of their progress here:

Even though I have to admit to never having done any serious coding (I am in law school afterall), I will say that I am duly impressed with the amount of work these folks have in front of them. When the new Intel Macs came out in January of last year a key concern was the speed of the emulator, codename Rosetta, which translated all of the instructions for the old PowerPC chip, into the new Intel format.

Most Apple users at that time were either in the Graphic Design industry or more casual computer users. But when Apple switched to Intel things changed radically. The speed of their computers, at least in terms of raw power, were easy to compare to their PC counterparts because the same Intel chip that powered a MacBook was also in Dell’s, HP’s and IBM’s.

For many it came down to the operating system of choice: Mac OS X Tiger or Windows XP. Now almost a whole year later and Apple is on the cusp of launching its new Operating System codename “Leopard,” and Microsoft is close to putting out Vista, but what switchers to Apple’s new Macs found was their machines gracefully outperforming their Windows-based counterparts in nearly every way.

That is to say, every way except for two. And here I come back to the primary Mac users before the switch, the graphic designers and the lightweight computer users. Because Adobe, which makes the popular graphic suite “Creative Studio 2,” including such heavy weights as Photoshop and Illustrator, didn’t update their applications to run natively on the new Intel chips, they had to be run through Rosetta, which meant a huge degradation in speed. Which meant the graphic design crowd were out of luck.

The lightweight computer consumers, users who wanted quick access to music in iTunes, movies in Quicktime, and the brief but important forays in Office, suddenly found those forays to be anything but brief! Of course, after having tasted the goodness that is OS X it has been difficult if not impossible for this crowd to run back to Windows, even if it can run Office at full speed.

Mac sales were up at Harvard by 30% this past year and Apple just posted quarter profits that sent its shares through the roof. With all signs pointing to Macs leading the next revolution in personal computing, one thing is for sure, a stellar suite of Microsoft Office and Adobe applications is a must.

It’s good to see they’re hard at work!

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