A couple of questions have been weighing heavily on my mind ever since I reviewed Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, so I went over to the Macworld Expo to get some answers from Geoff Price, product unit manager for the Macintosh Business Unit.

First of all, why is Entourage, the office suite's e-mail client, missing the MAPI (Messaging API) protocol used by Microsoft Outlook to communicate with Microsoft Exchange?

The answer, interestingly enough, is very simple.

It's just too damn hard.

"MAPI is a vast technical challenge," Price told me, adding that he is fully aware that Office for Mac users aren't shy in demanding that Entourage provide the full Outlook experience. "We'll continue to put a lot of focus on it," he said.

For now, users who expected the new release to provide full Exchange support, letting them access Outlook features such as Tasks and Notes, are going to have to wait awhile before Mac BU can solve the puzzle that is MAPI.

Despite getting the gold code late, a fact I'm still bitter about, I got to take Office 2008 for a spin last week and overall found the product had a lot of style, but not much in way of substance.

Much of what Price told me and a good chunk of the literature available from Microsoft on Office 2008 heavily focuses on "discoverability" and ease of use.

That's not a bad thing. Users should be able to easily locate all the features in the software, but if you ask me, a lot of these improvements to the interface look eerily similar to iWork '08, which was released in August of 2007. The big news there was a brand-new spreadsheet application, the first ever for the iWork family.

This leads into another question I had for Price and the gang at Mac BU: Why on earth would they remove support for Visual Basic macros, a cornerstone of Excel? That question also garnered a very simple answer.

Giving Office 2008 support for Apple's universal binary format, which enables Office 2008 to now run natively on both PowerPC and Intel-based Macs, is a big deal, and one that took a considerable amount of time to complete, Price said. He said the team was dead set on getting Office 2008 a timely release, and in order to do that, some things had to be put aside, such as the support for Visual Basic macros.

To be fair, let me add that Price wasn't being smug in his answers. In addition to looking incredibly exhausted, it seemed to me Price had been programmed by Microsoft's PR team to stay out of controversial territory, such as the lack of full support for Exchange and the absence of Visual Basic.

What I find most surprising, however, is that it seemed to me I was the first journalist to even ask these questions. Price was definitely thrown off and was obviously a little perplexed that he didn't have the assistance of a skilled marketing manager to help him wade through this mucky territory.

But tougher questions beg to be asked, since the product hits retail shelves today, and users will learn the hard way that their $400 purchase of the new Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac won't really get them what they've wanted for the last four years.

Think MAPI is hard--another spate of disgruntled users, especially in light of iWork '08, will be an altogether higher hurdle Mac BU is going to have to clear.