Fortune Small Business: The best PC for Microsoft Office is Apple Mac

"How's this for the ultimate digital-age, small-business irony: Want the best possible environment for Microsoft Office? Try running it on a Mac," Jonathan Blum reports for Fortune."The Apple line of personal computers and peripherals offers the small enterprise a tantalizing - if frustrating - set of risks and rewards. Macs, used as they are intended in their full 64-bit glory, are blazingly fast. Integration of the Intel processing chips and other bits of electronics, the popularity of the iPhone and the iPod, and the emergence of virtual desktop environments such as VMware means the Berlin Wall between all things Mac and all things PC is nowhere near as treacherous as it was just a few years ago," Blum reports.

Blum writes, "But turning the newly plays-nice-with-others Mac into a real ROI generator in your shop is no slam dunk, if you're accustomed to working with Windows machines."

Blum continues, "Earlier this year, the Macintosh Business Unit, one of the oldest teams at Microsoft, released Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac - not to be confused with Microsoft Office 2007, which runs on the Windows Vista and XP operating systems. The code optimizes for Macs the now-ubiquitous line of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and e-mail and calendaring tools (for the Mac, Entourage takes the place of Outlook). For the most part, Office 2008 for Mac simply emulates Office 2007 for the PC. But in my testing, this riff on the Microsoft flagship flourishes in the current Apple OS X Leopard environment."

Blum reports, "If you see margins in being super-efficient in the digital domain, and you have to guts and the means to make it work, I would invest the time in seeing if Office 2008 for Mac is for you."
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