Office for Mac 2008 packaging revealed: underwhelmingly boxy and brown

It’s hard to believe the same people who released Office for Mac 2004 in an innovative and stylish round plastic case that the rest of Microsoft has only just adopted, is packaging the upcoming Office for Mac 2008 release in a brown box carbon-dated to some time during the stone-age.

The Microsoft Mac BU have known to be much more innovative and risk-taking than the rest of Microsoft. So either this is has to be Pandora’s box in disguise or they got drunk with the Windows 3.1 guys one night.

Seriously, only if this box was designed by an intern I’d give them some credit for trying. On closer inspection of the high-resolution image, you can see the stunning special three-dimensional visual effects on the logos and icons otherwise more widely known as bevel and emboss, a layer effect that only advanced Photoshop users can master. And what’s with those curves? It looks like someone needed to fill some blank (brown) spaces but it was 4:59pm on a Friday, so created one textbook curve and copied it a bunch of times.

I had high hopes for how cool and innovative it could have been, I really did. Let’s hope the product features can withstand the competition from iWork ‘08, because the box sure isn’t. At least Apple’s box isn’t depressing.

Thankfully the rest of the product lineup have marginally better color schemes.