If this report is true, the apparent slowness of Microsoft to address bugs, add new features and develop apps in its Mac apps is probably due to the scaling back of the MacBU. Certainly, the vibes I've been getting of late are that only a few significant developers are working on things such as SyncServices support in Entourage and so on.
However, that's more or less how it always used to be: AppleScript development in Entourage was more or less the work of one man, Omar Shahine, who also did most of the Palm conduit development. Since he's moved on from the MacBU, it's been noticeable how little improvement and how many more bugs and problems have appeared in Entourage's AppleScript support; there's also been little or no development of the Palm conduit since the Office X version, despite its many, many flaws.
So despite the announcements at MacWorld and the constant boasting about how MacBU is the largest Mac developer other than Apple, don't be surprised if Microsoft's Mac work tails off even more over the next couple of years.
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Just because only a few people are heard outside the halls of Microsoft, that doesn't mean they're the only ones working on the projects--there are nearly 200 of us working hard on Mac Office every day.
While you note Palm conduit and AppleScript as weaknesses, it's primarily because we've been hard at work building a very sophisticated Exchange client. SP2 introduced a fairly large amount of additional scripting functionality (and some bug fixes for our dictionary) and March's Sync Services will provide yet another mechanism you can sync your Mac with a Palm.
FYI, Omar was actually a Program Manager on Entourage (as am I)... he had quite a few developers, testers, and others contributing to build the app but he didn't write a single line of code. We design features, but we don't develop them.
All 200 of you working on improved Exchange compatibility? Hmm. Okay...
The Palm conduit has been poor for a very long time now whereas the Exchange work was the main project of the main part of last year. Smaller companies than the MacBU can put together entire conduits in that time (Cf Mark/Space, which put together five last year). Are there really not enough people to fix bugs in a single existing conduit as well as develop new features? If there aren't, it kind of substantiates the original entry.
The Sync Services mechanism will remove a syncing mechanism, not add one, since the Palm conduit will effectively be discontinued. To sync with Palm devices will then require the completely hopeless Apple iSync conduit, which doesn't even try to preserve calendars or contact categories, or an investment in Missing Sync for Palm OS.
And word from the MacWorld floor has it that rather than syncing Entourage category to iCal calendar, the Sync Services implementation MacBU has planned will sync all Entourage calendars with a single iCal "Entourage" calendar. Sorry to say it, but this is hopeless for most people: my wife stopped using Entourage as a PIM because she couldn't preserve calendar categories when syncing with her Palm T3 using the Entourage conduit; certainly, I would rather keep using Paul Berkowitz's Sync Entourage-iCal AppleScript and preserve my calendar categories than switch to Sync Services if indeed that is how Entourage's implementation will be handled.
Thanks for clearing up Omar's input: it shows you that a manager really can make a difference.
Ultimately, I walk the MacBU halls each day and see more and more people working hard on Mac Office. You see issues in our software that you'd like to address that we haven't. While you've certainly got a valid reason to complain, there's no way that such evidence can be correctly tied to cutbacks within a product's development.
Just because a car company doesn't fix an oversteering problem on a 2005 model, doesn't mean they cutback design and development efforts on the 2006 model.
As a Program Manager on Entourage, I'll speak merely to what my team's been up to. Since 2004, we've released the PST Import Tool, SP1, SP2 (the Exchange release), the upcoming March release with Sync Services, Spotlight, and Smart card support, and concurrently becoming universal binary. That along with all the work towards the next major version of Entourage.
We've got a lot of customers who want a lot of different things. As in any company, we've got to evaluate where we want to allocate our time and energy in such a way that we believe is best for our customers and our business. You cannot use your disappointment of two features to progress as much as you'd like to assume that the entire application isn't progressing. While AppleScript and Palm support are important, we must prioritize our efforts as every software project faces. I can assure you that the efforts to build the Palm conduit and our AppleScript dictionary came at the cost of other features that other users wanted to see progress.
You can ask anyone who used Exchange in 2004 before SP2 and after SP2 for an understanding of how much work we've done to improve the experience. We made the decision to address the concerns of our Exchange users because of the tremendous amount of pain we heard from them when 2004 was released. If you've got feedback around the Palm conduit and our AppleScript support, providing us with more details of your complaints is a good first step in helping me insure you're thoughts are considered in our development priorities.
-Andy
BTW, I said 200 people working on Mac Office... not 200 people working on Exchange functionality. Just take a quick perusal of the various MacBU bloggers to see that we've got a variety of people working on a variety of things.
If this report is true, the apparent slowness of Microsoft to address bugs, add new features and develop apps in its Mac apps is probably due to the scaling back of the MacBU. Certainly, the vibes I've been getting of late are that only a few significant developers are working on things such as SyncServices support in Entourage and so on.
If you are seriously taking that report at face value, i recommend having someone else analyze it for you. It's almost nonsensical.
First, the Mac BU never developed Windows Media Player. That was, oddly enough the Windows Media group, and it was, to put it kindly, a debacle. Using Flip4Mac is the best thing MS could have done for its mac users, since you get the same feature set in an application that doesn't utterly and absolutely blow.
As far as the rest of the article, it's moronic. Let's see, by focusing on the products they currently develop, the Mac BU is only focusing on the products they currently develop, yet that's a pullback.
Um...
Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot?
Office and Messenger have been the only products from the Mac BU for quite some time now. (No, IE didn't count, it hadn't been updated in a dogs age, and was starving in the corner).
So how is that a pullback? The Mac BU is doing PRECISELY what it's been doing for quite some time now.
That's not a pullback, and you'd have to be thick to think it was.
This comment: consumer exit could mean the end of the low-cost Student & Teacher Edition, too, particularly with Apple offering iWork. is inane. Those are SKUs not products. At least ATTEMPT to research before blindly quoting ANYONE, regardless of title.
The article on betanews is idiocy.
Already done, many, many times, for the last three years. ;-) Many others have made similar requests.
My blog entry, however, wasn't to complain about Entourage as a user. If you examine my entry, it was merely a statement of the facts as I saw them.
Indeed. But have a glance at the improvements made to Word since the release of Office 2004:
In Excel:
In PowerPoint:
Compared to the output of the Entourage group, the Excel, PowerPoint and Word group haven't really done much at all, which suggests that the Entourage group are either much more of a can-do team than the others or that they're much bigger. Which is it?
What proportion of that 200 work on Entourage and what proportion works on Word, Excel and PowerPoint? And of those, how many are programmers?
Ah, John. Always nice to see a familiar name coming out all guns blazing. Calm down now.
The only thing I took from the article was Betanews' sources' suggestion that MacBU might be scaling back, not the Betanews analysis of the situation and certainly not the Jupiter analyst's report. Even then, I thought I included their reporting of this claim with a certain degree of scepticism and didn't use any of the Betanews 'evidence' to support my arguments. I only suggested that it chimed with certain impressions I'd been getting. Feel free to point out areas where I did otherwise, where I suggested their report was definitely true, or where I said my argument was based on the discontinuation of WMP for Mac.
I agree. That's why I didn't use anything other than the "scaling back" suggestion.
I do hope you mean that in the sense of "one would have to be thick to think it was", otherwise that would be quite rude. ;-)
In order to imply that some change had occurred (the scaling back), it would help if the precursor (the apparent slowness) itself constituted a change.
People, especially those whose pet bug/feature wasn't fixed/implemented, have complained about the "apparent slowness" almost as long as there has been a Macintosh Business Unit.
Office 98 was released in the summer of 1998. Office vX in November, 2001. Office 2004 in May, 2004.
Given that schedule, the next major release wouldn't normally take place until 2007.
That Microsoft has said that they'll ship Universal Binaries in March, 2006, is astonishing to me. If you're a developer, it's immediately obvious that their code is a long, long way away from "just click the Intel checkbox".
That Microsoft was able to go Universal *and* add major functionality is beyond astonishing.
So, if anything, I'd say that their current apparent speed is surprisingly fast.
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Oh yeah, one more thing. 200 people working on something doesn't equal 200 developers!
Add in graphics artists and sales and marketing people and management and HR and IT and you've probably taken well more than half of the slots just for these people.
And it's likely that you've got as many testers as developers and often you'd like more testers. And then you've got Program Managers who are entirely different from Manager managers. ;-)
Which means that you've got on the order of 40 to 50 developers.
Spread across Excel, PowerPoint, Word, Messenger, and Entourage.
Or, on average, 10 developers each per program.
So, considering all that they've done, I'd be hard-pressed to call them "apparently slow".
mikel
John nails it... the MacBU has been doing precisely what we've been doing for over 20 years of Mac productivity app development. While you correctly point out that the severity and number of changes in the apps doesn't balance across service packs, it's no different than what we've done in the past.
For example, go back and look at 10.1.4, an update that primarily delivered Exchange support to Entourage for the first time while the other apps had much smaller changes. When 2004 rolled around, all apps sill included a fair amount of work.
Perhaps thinking of it this way makes more sense: progress in Entourage is often incremental, broken up across a release's lifecycle. Other apps, while fixing issues, tend to be focused on more major version release cycles. The teams have a bit different development methodologies and road maps driven primarily by the demands of each app's customers. All of it aimed to deliver the best value for our customers.
As far as the rest of the article, it's moronic.
I agree. That's why I didn't use anything other than the "scaling back" suggestion.
Funny, your article would suggest that you have a rather different opinion of just how silly the betanews article is. Indeed, the tone suggests that you were almost taking it seriously in the whole.
In my mind, using the headline "Microsoft's Mac Business Unit is undergoing cutbacks" and then linking to an article that says sources say "Key developers in the Macintosh Business Unit at Microsoft have been reassigned elsewhere, such as the MSN unit, and the company has plans to slowly exit the consumer side of the business" was sufficient for people to assume that I was writing about possible cutbacks at the MacBU.
I admit, in retrospect, that since most people aren't aware of my mental processes, linking to the Betanews piece may have suggested I was endorsing the whole article; perhaps, I should just have linked and quoted the bits in which I was interested. In hindsight, that would probably have made things clearer, so my apologies to you for my lack of clarity.
But I do think it was still reasonably clear. A basic summary of the entry would be: "if the MacBU is scaling back, that would explain why these things I've noticed are happening."
Of course, the corollary of this is that if the MacBU isn't being scaled back, then it wouldn't explain those things I noticed and there's probably another explanation.
Certainly, I wouldn't have written the entry at all and I wouldn't have given any credence to Betanews' sources' claims at all if I'd known that the Universal Binary version of Office was due in March, which I think is a new piece of information: during the keynote, Roz Ho only said that Universal Binary work was "on track" and implied that the March update would optimise Office for use in Rosetta; maybe I misunderstood that, though.
As an earlier comment pointed out, getting a Universal Binary together in half a year is a colossal achievement for a development shop producing a product as large as Office, particularly one that doesn't/didn't use XCode as far as I know. It would certainly require a significant number of developers and I could understand why other things may have been put on the back-burner as a result, particularly with SyncServices and Spotlight work happening simultaneously right after the Exchange work.
Still, you write it as you see it at the time. You get more information, you refine or even change your opinion. That's life.
Mr. Buckley said:
Roz Ho said (at least the quotes I've seen said she did):
I thought "current versions" meant currently shipping versions; however, I'd be the first to admit that parsing sentences at this level of inferred meaning is a nearly pointless exercise. ;-)
A fuller quote from Roz Ho:
Looking back in a more nitpicky fashion, I can't really argue whether "all of these updates" meant Spotlight, Sync, et al, or whether it included the previous sentence talking about Intel native. Where one puts the <br> certainly affects the apparent meaning. ;-)
However, looking back through the above comments, we find the following written by the program manager for Entourage himself, Andy Ruff (my blog seems to have acquired at least one very illustrious reader):
That to me says Universal Binary in March.
But when Roz Ho was speaking, I got those two things as separate (ie March update for Sync Services and Spotlight, universal binaries for Messenger and Office "on track")
Others think otherwise, however:
Quoting Roz Ho, they go on:
It's all a bit confusing. Anyone want to clarify?
Universal binaries are coming in the next full version of Office:Mac. The March update is an updating to the existing Office:Mac 2004, and is not delivering universal binaries.
Nadyne's got it right... March is not UB. What I said is, for Entourage, we have two things going on:
-March release: Spotlight, Sync Services, and Smart Cards
-Next release: development on universal binaries (only a minority of devs are working on the March release) and new features, quality improvements, etc.
Basically the Entourage team is split in two: with a majority of our development focused on the next major version.
Apologies if my overloading use of commas appeared confusing :).