As I’ve reported on earlier a class action law suit is close to being filed against Microsoft by a group of Macintosh users for what they consider false and deceptive advertising about their Mac Office 2011 product. The suit will be filed in a California court because they have the toughest consumer protection laws in the nation.

At issue is the lack of sync ability from Outlook 2011 to Google Calendar, iCal, and iPhone. In it’s promotional literature, sales ads, etc, it is never once mentioned that this key feature for Mac users is missing, although the Mac Business Unit does talk about it on their “blog”.

Microsoft is promising a fix “sometime in the first half of 2011″, which is a rather vague response. Additionally Microsoft hasn’t helped cause by telling Mac users to use the previous version of Entourage from Mac Office 2008 as a workaround. This is quite the joke as the addition of Outlook to the suite adds an additional $80 to the price tag.

Imagine being told that a key component of a car you just bought – such as the tires – are not truly functional – but you could use the spares until the car company figures out a fix.

Microsoft claims that it designed Outlook 2011 for Mac users who use an Exchange Server 2007 or above, which is a very small group. The vast majority of Mac users sync through iCal and via other web-based email/calendar solutions and not through an exchange server.

Interestingly enough Microsoft is not offering a demo of the suit, as it does with the Windows version and nearly every other piece of software they sale. This is curious position and one can only assume that they calculated this maximize sales knowing that people usually don’t, and in some cases can’t, return software after it’s bought.