Microsoft’s troubled Macintosh Business Unit has yet again delayed the release of their flagship product Office 2008.
Craig Eisler, who took over as General Manager at the BU six weeks ago, announced yesterday that after running the current builds through quality assurance testing, the product was not suitable for release at the previously announced 2007 date.
Reasons sited by Eisler included, and I quote from an Ars Technica piece on the story: “The switch to Intel processors, the switch to different tools in the development stream, the switch in formats with Office—all of it presented different roadblocks for the team, and we wanted to make sure we could address all of those issues.”
Now, podcast listeners to my Fenestration segment will have heard me talk about this before, as I have covered the issue twice. These excuses are a load of rubbish. None of these things are a surprise that came out of the blue. The Intel switch was announced over two years ago, and the need to move to Xcode development for Intel Macs was highlighted AT THE SAME TIME. Office 2007 for Windows had the new file formats on the roadmap well before its launch, and was released itself in November 2006 – nine months ago. Since then, we have had 0.1 and 0.2 beta file converters that render Word 2007 document files down to the functional yet feature-poor RTF format.
That Eisler has come in so close to the original planned ship date for Office 2008 was not a good sign. However, up until now there has been no suggestion from Microsoft of a delay.
Interestingly, a browse through the MacBU blog reveals the following post by Sheridan Jones, Group Marketing Manager at Microsoft, in October 2006:
“Over the last few days, some Mac sites have been reporting that the Universal Binary version of Office for Mac (officially unnamed, but currently code-named Office 12) has been delayed, but there is no delay or deviation from our development schedule. We’re hitting our milestones, checking in our features, and making the move to Intel as planned. We’ve totally moved from Code Warrior to Xcode, so we’ve crested that hill. We usually ship 6 – 8 months after the availability of Office for Windows so we can do compatibility testing. This has been our shipping cycle for ages, and we’re right on track.”
Microsoft needs to shape up and fess up – their MacBU is under-resourced, has been poorly managed and is isolated from the rest of Microsoft’s development. Why else would the largest software company on the planet be unable to release an alternate platform version of their biggest non-OS product?
This is a real kick in the teeth for all Mac users – Microsoft isn’t interested in retaining our custom and supporting us properly. And what makes it worse is that they can’t even be honest about it.
Perhaps they should close down the MacBU and not bother? After all, if this is the best they can do in two years, is it worth their effort? Or perhaps THAT will be the next heavily spun press announcement from the Redmond Hegemony.
My advice for Intel Mac users is this – Take what you would spend on Office 2008, and buy a copy of Parallels or VMWare Fusion, a copy of Windows, and use the licence rights of your company copy of Office for Windows to run on a separate machine to install it to your VM. You get complete compatibility with Windows users, and you will not be funding or supporting the complete fiasco the is the MacBU.
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