Because then Office would end up like iTunes for Windows. Office for Mac is actually really, really nice. I'm sure they have a lot of shared common libraries between the two, but it isn't a quick and dirty port. They take what they can use, but make sure that the end result is tuned for the OS.
Not to derail the topic from the main issue at hand, but what's so wrong with iTunes on Windows? While it doesn't conform to all of the Windows idioms you'd expect, I still found it to be a better music player than just about everything else. This was a couple years ago, back when I was using Windows, however.
First, there is the issue of those Windows idioms that you expect on Windows. iTunes and Safari both essentially forgo any pretense of adopting Windows standards and instead keep their own way of doing things. It would be as if Office for Mac didn't use the menu bar on Apple, and instead, simply copied what they did on Windows.
It also doesn't work well with the OS. Things you can quickly and easily do in WMP are painful in iTunes.
I'm sure some people found iTunes a pleasant experience, but most people I know only have it installed because they have an iPod or an iPhone, and are forced to use it.
Basically, it works well enough, but it's not a polished application.
Office for the Mac doesn't follow standard Mac OS X idioms either ... for example using its own spell check rather than the system wide one. Printing goes through their own dialog which can cause all kinds of issues. Excel's scrolling is not the same as scrolling in the rest of OS X (they followed the scrolling from Excel on Windows which is horrible).
The worst part is that I like to have various apps open in my dock, then when I click on them or switch to them with Alt + Tab I DON'T want them to open a new empty document that covers the entire screen thereby disrupting my thought process, and even if it did that when I open an existing document it should close the temporary empty document it just created (see TextEdit for a good example of that).
In Excel for example the only way to get the function toolbar to show up is to click the "Formula Builder" in the "Toolbox". As soon as I click away from it to format the text a certain colour the bar disappears.
When I am within a Cell in Excel, I can't use any of the Cmd + key shortcuts to accomplish anything, for example, selecting the entire contents of said cell.
Going back to the text editing part, I can't easily look up a word in the built-in dictionary with ctrl + cmd + d while hovering over a word.
Fair enough. You do make some good points. =) However, I think it's fair to say the Office for Mac team has done a lot more to make their software for the Mac, rather than just a mere port.
While I'll believe that there are some things that you can do easily in WMP, but not in iTunes, I don't know what they are, and was really looking for examples with my previous question. The idioms, like I said, I'll give you. I remember the confusion of the preferences shortcut key combo. But having moved from WMP to iTunes, I don't remember missing anything terribly from WMP.
I can't do any direct comparisons any more, but one thing I keenly remember was WMP automatically syncing new content I added to my Music folder, whereas iTunes makes discovering new content painful.
WMP also had a play list on the side, and you could easily add to it. I miss that from iTunes, the concept of a play list that I don't have to save. I think there is sort of a way you can do that with the DJ... but it's so confusing.
WMP was like here, have a playlist area. Enjoy!
It's just very, very frustrating. I realize these are all probably personal preferences. I also realize I might be missing certain things, so if you have any suggestions, let me know. =)
