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Microsoft's Mac Business Unit
An anonymous reader writes "Today's Seattle Post-Intelligencer has an interesting piece on the folks who work at the Mac Business Unit for Microsoft."
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They make software for macs and have a mac business unit. I hope someone can get some shots of macs being unloaded from a truck.
slashdot, news for crazed liberal socialist zealots
"Far from it. But as one observer put it, it's as if they were working for a division of General Motors making parts for Volkswagens." I predict that this will be repeated when Linux is mainstream on the desktop.
Microsoft's muscular Herculean right arm has no idea what its tiny, flubbering nub of a left hand is doing.
Now imagining this congealing beast of a company with the head of Steve Ballmer gives me an interesting image. Kind of like the Trapper Keeper blob from South Park.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Nah...that might reveal the location of one of microsoft's unloading platforms...any employee would be fired for an offense so great...
But the people in the Mac BU take noticeable pride in Office for Mac as a product in its own right, not merely a translation of Windows Office to the Mac operating system. Office 2004 for Mac, for example, includes a number of features not available in the Windows version of Office, such as a "project center" in the Entourage e-mail program that lets users manage in one place a project that involves different types of files.
Communisits practicing Capatilism? wait -- is it the other way around?
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FM Clan
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The mac team cares about making high quality software. Anyone notice that the Mac versions of Microsoft software is usually better than the Windows counterparts?
So it tells you, MS can make good software, they just have to actually care.
They also fixed the CSS bugs on Mac IE. That just shows you...something. They have a fix for this, but they wont release it for windows. Add your consipiracy theory here.
False
True, at least in my opinion. Appleworks is stagnant, and hasn't even integrated some standard OS X features yet. Realtime spell-checking comes to mind, I'm fairly sure I was doing that using 1st Word Plus on an 8Mhz Atari ST 512k more than ten years ago...
Cheers,
Ian
well, maybe he does now
The guy's a Mac user...he can get another girlfriend
I come from a LAN down under
Where the packets flow and routers chunder
My guess is that the guys at Apple think office:mac is good enough for now and they would rather spend their money replacing shitty software (IE) and working on crazy new things for iLife (like GarageBand). I'm sure eventually appleworks will become a version of oo.org, but its not as big a priority as things that would make people actually switch to the mac. Also, they might be waiting for the OSS community to port oo.org to the aqua interface instead of spending valuable dev time on stuff that will eventually be done anyway.
For the record i use oo.org on a mac and it does a damn good job, imo.
Office for the Mac starting with Office 98 was a very Mac-like suite of applications (Ignoring the crappy version before that). In fact, Microsoft seemed to work hard to make it as Mac-like as possible, which even some other developers were a little lax at.
Office v.X is really good. Excel is a great application, Word a little less so, PowerPoint tolerable. I'd like to see Entourage made a little more Mac OS X technology-friendly-- e.g., give me the option to use the Mac's Address Book within Entourage. But I think they're still doing a good job overall. The fact that Microsoft supported Quartz so quickly is a great sign. Then, after Microsoft dropped the price of Office v.X after sales were a little dismal showed they were responsive to the market. It goes to show you that when Microsoft has to compete, they can do well.
However, Microsoft doesn't always want to compete -- it's easier to dominate than it is to compete. So when Apple introduced the excellent Safari (and with the success of Camino), Microsoft crumbled like a cookie. The problem is, Internet Explorer was really slow and felt kind of crappy. To this day, whenever you launch it, it bugs you about "making it the default application" while ignoring your request to not display the message again. Not surprisingly, Microsoft killed it (and with it, all Mac compatibility with web designers who insist on designing for Internet Explorer). That action showed the side of Microsoft that all Mac users expect is lurking underneath the shiny, Aqua exterior.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Methinks Appleworks will eventually become a version of openoffice, but only after the OSS community ports it to aqua. Apple feels like its dev time would be better speant on stuff like iLife that may make people actually switch to the mac, which a decent version of appleworks won't as MS office is pleanty good enough, even if apple doesn't profit off it directly.
Back in my day real time spell-checking was your cousin sitting next to you with a Speak 'n' Spell, keeping pace at 35 WPM!
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
Maybe every business has a unit that uses competitors products like Coke has a Pepsi unit and Crest has a unit that brushes their teeth with Aqua Fresh. Its like one big Utopian Free-Market captialist society....
Trix are for kids!
If I were Bill Gates, I could probably afford a Mac too.
Microsoft have written software ever since the Mac was released in 1984. In fact I believe one of the Office family (was it Word or Excel?) made its GUI debut on the Mac.
While they might have their differences and have even taken each other to court over OS appearance etc, Bill Gates has been quoted as saying something along the lines of 'The Apple Mac is the only other computer system worth writing software for'.
Personally I think the Microsoft Mac team write some great software. Nice to see common sense transcending the die-hard zealotry we usually see...
I have no idea why the parent is "funny". Everyone knows Microsoft makes Mac software, and without question, they have labs that have everything from Macs to vanilla Linux machines, Sparc Stations and everything else. Any company that does not investigate it's competition is beyond ignorent. People cut Microsoft a lot, but stupid people they are not.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Try a few hundred (maybe even thousand) Macs. I used to a Mac developer at Microsoft. We had plenty of machines.
When I was there, they were getting rid of some of their first generation PowerPC Macintoshes. I think in one day they threw away like 500 PowerMac 6100,7100, and 8100s. These were all working units that were going to the landfill because they were out of date. Most companies would have donated them to schools, but Microsoft doesn't donate their used Macs to schools because they figure that's one fewer DOS or Windows license that they won't sell.
And it wasn't like those 500 machines weren't being replaced. They were replacing them with G3s and G4s at that time just as fast as they were throwing the old ones out.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
I remember working for a certain networking hardware company that was not cisco and was fiercely competing with Cisco..... However all the site's switches and routing equipment that wasn't used explicitly for testing or development purposes? Cisco......
A *lot* of companies won't eat their own dog food, and that is really funny to me...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
That sir, is a load of bullshit. From one of my older posts on the same subject:
According to their Annual Report's MD&A they make a profit in Client (Desktop OS), Server, and Information Worker (Office, Visio, etc.). They lost money on Business Solutions (Great Plains Acct Software, etc.), MSN, Mobile and Embedded, Home Entertainment (XBox, etc.), and Other (which had something to do with the sale of Expedia).
It doesn't break out Mac division but I am sure it is profitable but so negligible in total as to be almost a joke.
As for their divisiona losing money. The total loss of all divisions losing money for their Q1 was $335M vs the profit from their profitable divisions of over $5 BILLION.
I can understand your hatred for Microsoft but your spreading false information makes you no better.
For those of you looking for the info it is in Note 11 of the MD&A (which is after the financials for you non-accountants).
How else are they going to get any work done when they get hit with these Outlook viruses?
While I generally like Office, Remote Desktop and can tolerate Virtual PC (lack of G5 support is not acceptable) I find the Mac BU decision re: Exchange server quite criminal. Yes, they added support for Exchange server in Entourage, however that support is for Exchange 2000 and only if you leave things alone in a stock install. We have numerous clients that run Exchange sevrer 5.5 and 2000 but turn off all but MAPI support. MS decided to not include any support for the MAPI protocol in Entourage!! They could have just ported Outlook 2001 to the Carbon spec and we'd be pretty well off but they took another route wich in most corporate environments almost lock us out totally in this manner. Thank Apple for including a fairly robust Classic environment so we can still run Outlook 2001 but if you've ever dealt with Classic apps and trying to get something like Outlook 2001 to runs problem-free then you know that we really need an OS X native Exchange client. To add insult to injury they still don't offer MAPI support in the new Office 2004 they recently announced. Just last week I sent feedback to Apple asking them to explore the possibility of them creating an collaboration system like Notes or Exchange on the Mac platform but making sure they use open protocols, 100% equal Mac, Windows and Linux clients, a plug-in system to integrate with Notes and Exchange and practically give it away. Talks about a killer app for Mac OS X Server.
It has little to do with marketing budgets; they advertise in Macintosh magazines- they're regularly the first two pages in Macworld. You wouldn't be asking questions if you saw how much Office for the Mac costs.
That's doubtful.. The OS and Office divisions are the cash cows for Microsoft. There is no way the Mac group is more profitable than the Office group.
Office is the Mac group's only product, and further, I specifically said the OS division is more profitable. Read, kay? Jesus, it was even in the text you quoted from my comment.
Here's a few numbers to wrap your head around. 1)MS Office for PCs? Included with almost every PC for nearly free. 2)Office for Macintosh? $400. What's bigger, 5% of the market at $400/copy, or 95% of the market at "near free"? Hmm?
Why do you think the Macintosh version of Office always comes out first? Why do they sign agreements committing to developing it well into the future? Why do you think it doesn't have any pisses-off-customers product activation? Hmm...maybe because they make a shitload of money off it and want to keep the gravy train rolling?
Please help metamoderate.
(In millions) Operating Income/Loss Three Months Ended Sept.30 2003
Client 2,264
Server and Tools 370
Information Worker 1,591
Microsoft Business Solutions -79
MSN 58
Mobile and Embedded Devices -32
Home and Entertainment -273
People get those rates because of deals that companies like Dell, HP, etc. negotiated with Microsoft.
No, they get those hardware bundle rates because Microsoft offers them for Windows systems. You can get it, too, just go up on PriceWatch and see how cheap you can get Office 2003 with the purchase of a hard drive.
HP and Dell get an even GREATER discount than you are able to get because of the volume of units they move.
Three reasons to discriminate against Mac users:
1) They have a virtual monopoly on office software for the Mac. Therefore, they can charge each and every Mac user full pop without fear of losing marketshare. I believe Office has consistently been the top-selling software title for Macintosh for a number of years, so what's the motivation to cut the price?
2) It contributes to the general belief that Macs are overpriced. You spend a couple hundred more on the hardware, and then you have to spend an extra $200 more than Windows users for Office? It helps price Macs out of the competitive price range of Wintel systems.
3) Keep Macs out of the lucrative corporate market. Again, they'll sell in volume discount their Windows solutions, but corporate Mac users are stuck.
Given all the times /.'ers complain about Microsoft doing bloatware, you'd think there would be some thanks for doing a new version that's snappier, up to date, but doesn't go overboard on new features.
I easily spend 1000+ hours a year in Office v.X, and I'm really looking forward to the new version. It's darn complete - there really weren't that many holes, and it looks like they're filling most of them.
My video compression blog
OG blows in it's Visio interoperability --granted .vdx support is recent... If it would read .vsd files I wouldn't be so opposed to using it --but that's not OG's fault. As one of the two Macs in a company of about 50 Visio users, I routinely find myself using Visio via VPC to export vsd to vdx files. If I'm lucky VPC/WinXP/Visio will keep from crashing just long enough for me to pull the export off.
That's why I want MS Visio for Mac. I'm hoping they can improve upon the Windows counterpart just like Office v.X. So, maybe my anger was a little misdirected. OG doesn't necessarily blow, but jumping through hoops just to read a Visio drawing in OG does blow.
From the article: ...they recounted with pride such tales as the colleague who broke up with a girlfriend who bought a Windows PC.
This kind of statement really doesn't help the Mac cause... To a non-Mac user, it freaks me out, to tell you the truth. It seems too cult for my tastes.
I support a whole campus full of PC and Mac Office users. I disagree that the Mac version is better. My PC users don't complain much about some of the bugs we find in the Mac version. I find that there most common complaint is "unexpectedly quit" issues with office even with all the patches.
I find that Mac users are pretty happy with months of uptime but Windows 2K through XP seem pretty stable with a good patch and antivirus regimen. YMMV. Stability is an issue on any system that doesn't get checkups and patches. Windows is definitely high maintenance in comparison.
Linux is still far from "user-friendly" as a desktop solution. Stable or not, it's still has a huge "geek factor" to bridge before you can just give it to a user without your phone and pager going off every 5 minutes. Talk about high maintenance.
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
As far as I know, .docs created using Office 98 are still translatable to all post version on both platforms. This is a 6 year old app. So, if they stopped tomorrow how long would it be before Mac users REALLY felt the pinch?
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
Microsoft buys virtual PC. Microsoft adopts power IBM PC processor for next Xbox. Word for OSX could be adapted to run on power pc hardware uunder another OS. MS feels mounting pressure of malicious code and is aware of platform monoculture dilemma. Windows for many people just somewhere to run office. If MS wanted to build a new machine with backwards compatibility through virtual PC, running office natively, then all the pieces are falling into place. Get ready for the clone wars
I realize that you didn't make the comment above about Microsoft "secretly using Sun servers", but those are the kind of statements that really make me upset because they are demonstrably false. If you ever had an opportunity to visit the Redmond campus, you would see that.
Microsoft invented the term "dogfood." Eating your own dogfood was slang introduced in the DOS days. Dogfood is software that's not even in BETA yet: in other words, not ready for public consumption. Microsoft is famous for having its people eat their own dogfood. It is not like the networking company you worked at.
Other terms first used at Microsoft? Vaporware. Death March. OOF. See other Microsoft jargon.
How many of you were running 2.3.x or 2.5.x kernels before 2.4.x and 2.6.x came out? It's amazing how people on Slashdot just can't seem to give Microsoft credit.
I'll come clean here and say that I in fact did used to work for Microsoft as an intern, in the Macintosh Business Unit. As in, no shit, there I was. These are the people I used to eat lunch with, talk about bugs with, and share the passion for a product with etc. They are Macintosh zealots in the Microsoft community, and deeply care not only about Microsoft, but also the Macintosh community as a whole. As much as you may think of them as black sheep, they wear it as a badge of honor.
;)
I've never heard more talk from a product group about what the "community" will think about a feature, what value it adds to the target audience, etc. It was a core focus, to not only bring Microsoft Office to that community, but enable them to interact fully with their Windows counterparts. There was no secondary citizenship. These people put their all into the product, and are met with relatively great success.
An amazing amount of work goes into making the software a great user-experience. Applescript exposure, different UI, Mac-specific features and development... all of those things because the Mac product was hugely important. Localization into at least 5 different languages (off the top of my head). Different product SKUs, and different new developments with what the Mac community had in mind.
A very cool thing that I found about the team was that in no way lived under the shadow of the greater Office group. They pride themselves on having the "best" version of Office, as wierd as that sounds.
Kevin Brown, the Business Unit Manager when I was there said at a MacWorld (paraphrased from memory): "We know that our users are mostly home and small business users. People aren't using Excel to make incredibly complicated PivotTables, but are using it to balance their checkbook". That quote stuck out in my mind as something that always made me chuckle. It was a realistic look at how this "enterprise class" piece of software was realistically being used by the community at large.
These are developers and testers who use their Mac everyday (some even faking their PC). I knew one tester who used the product for everything. Signs, balancing his budget, right on down to making grocery lists in word, and porting them over to Powerpoint, just to see.
I worked on the clamshell version of Office 2001, and the trophy copy still sits on my desk. I hate to hear when people bash the group as some kind of whack strategy to sink Apple, because not only are these people my professional friends, but they simply don't think that way.
It was a refreshing two summers working for the Evil Empire (tm), but being a part of a group with as much passion for quality and desire to put out the best software possible. It's made me a rabid tester, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
I remember that huge Mac lab you see behind you running SETI at home, as we were in the top 20 or so for a while
If you guys are reading this, glad to hear you're going strong.
--Jay Bonci (summer of 1999, 2000, Mac Office Core)
Also, even if Office goes away for Mac I don't think its going to be much a problem. OpenOffice is making great strides, I have had several clients switch to OpenOffice and save thousands of dollars as opposed to going to Office 2003. Most of my clients don't need anything other than a word processor and spread sheet on most of their desktops.
On the other note, of my clients, the video production folks are buying macs in droves and spending an average of $7000 a peice for them. Why? Final Cut Pro is the defacto small shop editing software for video production companies. Even major motion pictures are being edited on the machines and that market's not going away so long as Apple continues producing excellent software.
Furthermore, there is something going on your not reading about much: The rest of the world is going to LINUX as their OS of choice. Microsoft maybe able to bribe some back to their side, but largely, I think the desktop market over the next five years outside of the United States is going to Linux. I also see some larger companies going to Linux as well as soon as a clear defacto desktop enviroment emerges.
Discovered this while working and studying in Germany. The german college I attended for a semester had two Linux labs and one Windows XP lab. The students spent more time usually typing up papers in StarOffice on SuSE Linux than in MS office and Windows.
Mac and BSD dying threads just aren't true. I switched myself from Linux to Mac about two years ago and never looked back. So far I have been very impressed with my iBook and now Powerbook.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Firstly, internally, Microsoft uses SQL Server and Exchange pretty much exclusively for their respective purposes (for both development and enterprise). Exchange is perfectly capable of handling all of microsoft's employee's email around the globe.
Secondly, if there are no MS products in use at Sun, how do you recon they develop and test their Java software?