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A history of Entourage and becoming an Office application

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Omar posted a history of Entourage and the journey to becoming an Office application. I knew it had to be Omar, since he misspelled becoming :-) As the development lead for OE 5 and then for Entourage 2001, I went through all of this with Omar.

Mac Office has longed struggled with the conflict between consistency with the Windows counterparts and with the Apple guidelines. On one hand, users that switch between the Mac and Windows want the Office apps to always behave the same. On the other hand, users who switch between Mac Office apps and other Mac apps want the Mac Office apps to behave like their other Mac apps. As a part of the Office suite, users expect Entourage to behave like the other Office apps. So, even though there isn't a Windows version of Entourage, there's a push to have some consistency with Windows. We always prided ourselves on following Apple's guidelines and being a great Mac application, so this caused some pain.

As an example, take the Home key. When editing text, if you hit the Home key on Windows, it goes to the beginning of the line. On the Mac, it jumps to the top of the text. The other Mac Office applications follow the Windows model. OE 5 followed the Mac model. With Entourage, we were asked to follow the Office model so that if users edit text in Word and Entourage, the keyboard shortcuts would be consistent. We changed the default behavior, but added a preference to get back to the standard Mac behavior. I wish we had instrumenting so that we could see how many people use the Mac behavior.

Another area that caused friction was feature parity between the Office applications. Sometimes we'd want to add a feature or take advantage of some new OS technology, but would get pushback if the other apps weren't doing so. The argument was that sometimes it's better for a feature to not exist in any apps that for it to just exist in one and break consistency. This argument never made a lot of sense to me, but people were usually reasonable in the end.