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A Tour of Microsoft's Mac Lab

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the so-many-shiny-boxes dept.

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."

12 of 177 comments (clear)

  1. Does Apple have a Windows lab? by the_humeister · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Now that iTunes and other apps run in Windows, does Apple have a Windows lab?

    1. Re:Does Apple have a Windows lab? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Gotta post anon, but yeah. Despite all the noise about unfairness, we do a fair bit of benchmarking against similar hardware. That and not everything is written for a Mac; we are a hardware company and we do design hardware. Sometimes we can get it to run on a Mac, but sometimes it's better to just buy a few Dell's, throw Linux and Windows on them and give them to the teams. It's the ship date that matters, not whether we eat our own dog food (although we do try to eat it when possible).

    2. Re:Does Apple have a Windows lab? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I visited apple about a month back (more specifically, the audio and video codec folks). Each office typically had three Macs and two Dells, and yes, there was a lab with numerous configurations of "dull, boring PCs" since everything related to Quicktime had to build and run on OS X and Windows. Apparently they do a lot of testing on different PC configurations, which shouldn't suprise anyone with knowledge of software development.

      What did surprise me was to learn that specific employees at Apple use Thunderbird on Windows for their day-to-day e-mail.

  2. Undercover marketing? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Between this and the story we heard yesterday from the ex-Unix Microsoft programmer, do you get the feeling that some sort of viral/undercover "come work at Microsoft" marketing is going on?

  3. Microsoft Advocacy by MrNonchalant · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This seems like it's part of a broader wave of MS advocacy and transparency that has unfolded over the past year or so. Although I still don't like Microsoft terribly much, these glimpses inside have given me some pause. The employees and culture seem actually decent enough.

  4. Re:I feel a disturbance in the force... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Been there, done that. What happens is you have five recruiters representing Microsoft saying that you're qualified for the hottest openings that they have, and then they string you along for two months until it becomes obvious that the position has already been filled by an internal candidate. Meanwhile, your unemployment benefits run out. They don't call it the Evil Empire for nothing.

  5. Bug Testing by xwizbt · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I love the comment:

    "Mac Office is one of those "software in the large" projects. There's really no way a team of our size would be able to adequately test all of Office without the use of automated testing. Every day we get a new build of Office from the build machines, we copy it to our Xserve RAID connected to our dual G5 Xserve for access by our 249 automation machines. We then run thousands and thousands of tests on the new build. Typically we get 4 builds of Office each day: English Ship, English Debug, Japanese Ship and Japanese Debug. We run our entire battery of tests against all the builds and then report any failures to testers via email. The testers investigate the failures, log any bugs and then move on to their other duties as testers. This turns out to be very effective, if used properly, and over time it allows testers to focus on things humans do best, while letting computers verify the repetitious and mundane, but necessary, testing. It all started with our Blue and White G3s years ago. At first when testers would upgrade their test machines, instead of recycling the machines, "The Lab" would get them to add them to our automation machine pool. I think we had about 20 machines to begin with."

    So how is it when I attempt to view a word document I always manage to hit the error. I'm not being a wiseass - it's not every time. But if this takes place, why do I see so many difficulties when I attempt to view a word-for-windows document?

  6. Re:The last guy who did this got fired. by donutello · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The Macs he photographed were going to the XBox360 team to use as dev kits. At that time it was not publicly announced that the 360 would be based upon a PowerPC core. My guess is that had something to do with his firing.

    --
    Mmmm.. Donuts
  7. Microsoft on Macs and a Google blog?!? by truthsearch · · Score: 5, Interesting

    A Microsoft employee is reporting on Mac use from a site owned by Google? Hang on, I think I see a pig passing by my 4th story window...

    Why is his blog not on an MSN domain or something like that?

    --
    Developers: We can use your help.
  8. PR crap by metamatic · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.

    Yeah, right. The Windows media group have given up on Windows Media Player for the Mac, so what are they testing?

    And since when does the Microsoft games group develop anything for the Mac? Halo was ported by Westlake Interactive and MacSoft, and they dropped the Mac port of Flight Simulator decades ago. So what games are actually written at Microsoft for the Mac?

    Drivers? They licensed the code for their Mac mouse drivers from Alessandro Montalcini. Maybe they do a little testing now and again, but most of it is just USB HID anyway. Do Microsoft make any other hardware for the Mac?

    Internet Explorer? Oh, sorry, they dropped that too.

    The whole thing smells like PR crap designed to make Microsoft look like a major developer of Mac software, when in truth all they really work on these days is Office.

    --
    GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
  9. Windows Media group by theid0 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'd be interested to know why the Windows Media group is in the Mac lab. They did such a poor job on their Mac port that they are now directing people to 3rd party software.

  10. Who would have thunk it? by rice_burners_suck · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Who could have guessed that Microsoft has so many Macs in its Mac lab? But then again, I think there was a story here on /. sometime ago about Microsoft having a Linux lab, too. And something more recently about how Microsoft is going to support Linux in some situation or other.

    But on the other hand, I should have guessed, since they do make Mac software, that there should be a bunch of Macs of all models to test the software.

    So that begs this question: Apple builds all the Macs. This means that there are basically a finite number of possible configurations for a Mac. It could be 100 or 1000 or 10000, depending on how far back you want to go, which Mac OSes you want to support, etc., but somewhere along the line, there is only so many ways that a Mac might be set up. On the other hand, there is basically an infinite number of possible configurations for a PC. Just think how many motherboard manufacturers there are, how many different versions each has turned out, how many x86 processor clones there are, how many versions of the x86 architecture since, say, the Pentium, how many different video configurations, how many sound cards, how many of each thing, and you'll come to the conclusion that if there are, say, 2 billion PCs in the world in current operation, then there must be about 2 billion and 1 configurations out there. So as I began to say, this Mac lab thing begs the question: How many different configurations of PCs does Microsoft have in its PC lab for testing Windows, Office, and all their other thousand and one apps?