Ever since these new Intel books from Apple started coming with built in iSight, I have been dyeing to video chat with all my buddies. If I had it my way, I would be on ichat and only ichat, however, since im in Canada and absolutely no one here uses AOL (AIM), ichat is basically a write off. The only exception is when I’m in the office and need to transfer files from one computer to another, then im all about “Bonjour” which I think is one of MAC OSX’s strongest features. Anyways - Back to my rant.

Windows users running windows messenger have had audio & video capabilities for as long as I can remember, as well as things like nudges, winks, games etc. Although most of those features are just little quirks, I still would like to see them on the Mac version of messenger.

Well Microsoft FINALLY got off their butt’s and release a new version of Office for mac (4 years to late). I realize that they had to convert all their code to run on intel macs properly but if Adobe can convert a whole creative suite to a new platform in about a years time, there’s no reason why Office took so long.

When Office 2008 was released in mid January, the Microsoft Business Unit (MBU) - who develops the mac based apps, told us the new version of Messenger would be available by the end of january. I have been watching the MBU’s mactopia site for any sort of update, but like usual, they don’t seem to care (not even a blog update!).

I’m really anxious to be able to finally use my Macbook Pro’s iSight for video chatting. Let’s just pray that the Messenger 7 for mac isn’t another typical bloated piece of software from Microsoft, much like the long awaited messenger 6 was. For the time being, I’m using Adium which is a fantastic app for chatting on multiple services at once. The team over at Adium says they are close to releasing a new version that also supports A/V, I wouldn’t be surprised if Adium supported the new features before the official release of Messenger 7.

This brings me to my question - Is Microsoft purposely delaying it’s release of products on the mac in order to push people to a Windows platform?

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Tags: adium A/V, Mac msn messenger 2008, Mac msn messenger audio video, Messenger 7 Mac

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 9th, 2008 at 9:03 am and is filed under Apple/Mac. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.