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A Tour of Microsoft's Mac Lab
I'm Don Giovanni writes "David Weiss of Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit (MacBU) gives a virtual tour of Microsoft's Mac Lab at Redmond, reportedly one of the largest Mac labs outside of Apple (includes 150 Mac minis!)." Great pictures. From the article: "The first area in the Mac Lab is what we call the Sandbox. This is where we keep all significant hardware configurations Apple has released that run our products. We'll use the Plasma display to, watch DVDs and play games, uh er, I mean, do important training presentations. ;-) It's actually very useful because everyone can be in front of a computer and still see the main screen and follow along. Often other groups at Microsoft (the games group, hardware drivers group and even the Windows media group) will come and schedule time in the Mac Lab to test their software on the different hardware configurations."
He got fired for showing off a company loading area on his blog (which is supposed to be off-limits to cameras). It had nothing to do with Macs.
Go somewhere random
However, Apple doesn't develop systems software for Windows that require in-depth knowledge about hardware drivers.
But Apple still needs to test on a representative variety of hardware if Apple wants to make its applications robust against defective drivers that are, unfortunately, common in the Windows world.
does Apple have a Windows lab?
How else do you think they got BootCamp up and running?
Office alone makes Microsoft a major developer of Mac software. The two most important ISVs for Apple are Microsoft and Adobe. One argue which one is more important -- I see the views of both sides, though I think Adobe is more important because recreating Office would be easier than CS 2 -- but they're both essential to maintaining the vitality of the Mac platform.
What's even funnier is that IE 6 for the Mac was already coded and ready to ship, but they decided to shelve it instead of release it.