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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."
...as if millions of slashdotters applied for testing jobs at Microsoft and then were suddenly silenced.
It looks like the Mac Business Unit alone is responsible for at least 1% out of Apple's 5% market share!
Where do you think the Vista user interface design team has been spending all it's time?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Now that iTunes and other apps run in Windows, does Apple have a Windows lab?
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?
This is very interesting to see since the last guy in the news to blog about Microsoft's Macs got fired for it. Perhaps this is the rebound from the bad press they recieved over that incident?
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.
Off the record but I've heard that the label on the Mac lab door actually reads "the copy room"
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?
An entire room filled with bright, cheerful Microserfs wearing shirt padding and plastic bald caps greet me as I enter the Fucking Kill You Lab in Redmond's well-lit East Campus. Before I can say a word, chairs fly across the room in all directions as each vows to Fucking Kill (TM) Google, Apple, Sun, Linus Torvalds, and inexplicably, Olestra.
Fucking Kill You Lab director Thaul Purrott tells me that this is "the future of Windows innovation" and not surprisingly, customer support just as an airborne chair caster nearly decapitates him.
"Made up/misattributed quote that makes me look smart. I am on
But no Coke Zero? Lame.
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.
Here's a tour of Microsoft's Linux Lab:
Cool, huh?
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.
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
I wonder why they couldn't keep developing Internet Explorer??
Because (to paraphrase their official statement) they could not hope to compete, because they couldn't get the kind of access to OS X that the Safari team could.
It's actually kind of funny when you remember that Microsoft always disputed other Windows developers' claims that they couldn't compete against Microsoft's own Windows applications for much the same reason. The term "Chinese wall" comes to mind.
~Philly
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.
I'm sorry, but as a lifelong Mac user, I refuse to read comments set in monospace type. It is most displeasing to the eye.
Bonsai Kitten: TNG
I posted a relatively innocuous comment to that story earlier today, it was censored and did not appear. It read, in its entirety, "There is one thing conspicuously absent from the pictures: people."
I must have hit a nerve. Sure the story was about the lab. But don't people use the lab? There are a couple of people who appear way in the background of one pic, so small you can hardly see them, but otherwise the pictures are totally devoid of human life. I am sure the set of photos required clearance from Microsoft management, did they object to publishing photos of their personnel as some sort of security risk? Microsoft has been conspicuously touchy about bloggers describing their Mac facilities, remember the blogger who got fired from his temp job for posting a pic of G5s on the MSFT loading dock? So it wouldn't surprise me if the absence of people in the photos was a deliberate choice by MS management. And that is a lot more intriguing than the pics of a bunch of server racks.
... why Vista is late!
"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."
I wish I could filter out the annoying Pickens articles...
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?
Put the joint down and back away slowly.
Chuck
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.