Office for Mac 2011 is finally out, and I've been tinkering around with it for the past few days. I do find it to be a huge improvement over 2008 - here are some thoughts:

• Dodgy email client Entourage is out and Outlook for Mac is finally back in - apparently they've redesigned it from the ground up in the Cocoa development framework and put in most of the features from the latest version of Outlook for Windows. All my email accounts are aggregated in Gmail so setup was quite simple - and so far Outlook is certainly working much better than expected. It's also much quicker.
  
• Word, PowerPoint and Excel are much more stable (for example, 2008 had an extremely annoying problem with switching between documents on different screens)
  
• Word has a new distraction-free full screen mode that just works
• The splash screens are very à la iWork
  
• The new icons are finally Mac-worthy

Microsoft announced today the range of 10 phones Windows Phone 7, the long-awaited update to the Windows mobile OS, will be launching on:

• 5 of them are, of course, built by leading WinMo device manufacturer HTC
• it seems to be completely different from WinMo 6.x - in a good way
• I find it particularly interesting that Microsoft has successfully managed to impose its hardware restrictions (3 main buttons, camera button, full GUI ownership, etc)
• there's a UI demo (first video in this post) from Waggener Edstrom that I find simply too clumsy for this level

Now let's see what happens, seeing Microsoft's tough and constantly evolving competition (Apple, Google, RIM)...

McCann PR and Microsoft Romania have received two Distinguished Honors from The Stevies' International Business Awards: one in the Best Online Press Room category (for Microsoft Romania's Digital Press Centre) and one in the Marketing Campaign of the Year - For a Product category (for the launch of Windows 7 in Romania). I'm very proud to have contributed to these campaigns. Congratulations to everyone who was involved!