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."

Re:Needs presentation skills

[gobbo]

To be fair to them, they didn't have much to present. Wow, Excel is finally going to be reasonable at printing, and you can record audio and stick it in a text file. The muted response from the crowd was hilarious, though... most people were probably sitting there thinking "why isn't Apple sending an in-house development team to OO.org?"

At least installing MSOffice on the Mac is dead-simple, they got that right.

Re:Credit where credit is due, but ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just as a point of reference .. I spoke to the Mac BU @ macworld exp this year about their plans w/ entourage .. that project center is a great idea and asked if they were planning on getting it to work w/ address book .. the dude told me that they were working on that, you could import the addresses and stuff into entourage .... notice, you're not using the address book .. so I asked him if you can export out back to address book ... which made him laugh a bit and he asked me why they'd do something like that ...

too bad ... entourage seems like it could be quite useful.

Re:Office for Mac

[woohoodonuts]

True, at least in my opinion.

as someone who has just finished two books on Microsoft Word...
(uses 10% of my processor just sitting open in the dock... has only two choices for background color... has a sub-par thesaurus)
and as someone who has previously written a book on Appleworks...
(document manager slows significantly with over a few hundred documents... plain white background is only choice [yes, this is a nice feature to be able to change when you work with text for 5+ straight hours]... doesn't consistently convert files properly... finally, it appears to be stagnant.)
I can safely say that the next evolutionary step is to Nisus Writer Express. [nisus.com] The software has recently been updated and is worth a second look. If this sounds like a plug for Nisus... it is.
New features for nisus can be found here. [nisus.com]

If you think there's no solution for appleworks other than Word and other office variants... check it out.

Re:Macs have a purpose

[soft_guy]

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.

Re:try bread and butter

[RazzleFrog]

That sir, is a load of bullshit. From one of my older posts on the same subject:

According to their Annual Report's [slashdot.org] 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).

Re:they care...

[cmacb]

Well, they have stopped support for IE on the Mac so thats a moot point. IE was the best browser for the Mac for exactly the amount of time that it was the ONLY browser for the Mac. I switched to Mozilla when it was still flaky and slow, but the Safari browser blows both the others away.

Basically Microsoft doesn't like competition. If they can't buy them or put them out of business they just take there equipment and go home like a pouty child.

I have a feeling once there is a native office suite for the Mac, most likely Open Office, but others are in the works, Microsoft will, again, pack up it's toys and slink back to the Intel platform only. If Intel ever decided to throw a curve ball at Microsoft they (MS) would be in big big trouble.

I think this deadly embrace that Intel and Microsoft are in though is bad for both companies in the long run. MS would be far better off as platform neutral vendor of software of all kinds. Intel would be far better off just beating the crap out of other hardware companies in terms of price performance. They will price themselves out of the market for low cost PCs in a few years (well, now actually), especially non-US ones and it is at that point that Microsoft may wish to revive its ability to create software for something other than Intel boxes.

Re:try bread and butter

[WhoDaresWins]

and a profit-making division at Microsoft is getting be something of a rarity what with the company loosing money through the nose in countless divisions. In fact, I believe there's only one division more profitable- the OS division.

What utter nonsense are you talking about? Don't go about inventing facts when you don't know what the real facts are. Out of Microsoft's 7 divisions, 4 make a profit. Three of those 4 divisions make a huge profits: Client (OS), Info Worker (Office), and Server & Tools. The Business Solutions and Mobile & Embedded Devices divisions are small and incubating businesses so they don't make much of a profit now. The really big division that makes a loss is Home & Entertainment and thats primarily due to XBox. So no you are totally wrong about Microsoft having only one division that makes a profit. Next time don't spout your own imagination as facts. You can check the Microsoft profit and loss figures for each division in the Form 10Q SEC filings [microsoft.com] that Microsoft makes. Here are the relevant numbers from that report -

(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

Re:Do the numbers

[RazzleFrog]

Hahahah. Now I understand. You really have no clue what you are talking about. I usually don't take on other people's arguments but you are really scary. You say Office is the Mac group's only product and then you tell him to read? You didn't even read the article.

I can't even begin to untangle the mess about OS division vs Office division vs Mac Division.

And you obviously never priced a PC. Office doesn't come with PC's. Dell charges you $129 for the most basic Office and $340 for the full Pro version.

And here is some numbers for you:
Market size (hypothetically) - 10,000,000
Mac - 500,000 * $400 = $200,000,000
PC - 9,500,000 * $129 = $1,225,500,000

I already made my point in another post about Mac version coming out first.

Re:try bread and butter

[TheGrayArea]

There was a time when many MS products were going to target multiple platforms. If you find an older version of Access you can see some "Not available on Mac" comments that were left in the help by accident while the mac version was still in progress (never shipped). Likewise Visual Basic was going to be ported to the Mac as well and was at least partially done (mostly VBA stuff).

Re:Most requested ports??

[libra-dragon]

I agree with your points above, but maybe I should have elaborated.

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.

Re:Credit where credit is due, but ...

[Graymalkin]

Actually Microsoft killed IE in name but released MSN Explorer [microsoft.com] in its place. Explorer uses the Tasman rendering engine with the glitzy MSN interface on top of it. It's pretty much the same as MSN Explorer on Windows, including even WMP and Messenger.

It is likely Microsoft will keep MSN Explorer et al up to date because they are trying to grab the Mac crowd for MSN internet access. Earthlink and AOL have long had good support for Mac users and as such they've got quite a few Mac subscribers. Every Mac you buy comes with 30 days of free Earthlink service, AOL dial-up support in Internet Connect, and an AIM compatible IM client. Apple's very friendly with Earthlink and AOL for sticking with them even in bad times. MSN on the other hand has pretty much ignored the Mac market for most of its operational lifetime. Now that MSN is fighting to retain customers left and right they have to support the Mac market. They're losing customers left and right to cheaper dial-up services and broadband providers.

Re:Could you give me a pointer to the version of

[Jord]

Try reading. He said they were using Sun machines because Exchange could not handle the load. He did not say Exchange is running on Sun hardware.

Try reading before posting, it does wonders.

more like this

[twitter]

I prefer the victim's perspective, rather than the perpetuator's. You present us with an MSNBC article full of appologies and doges. It was more like Microsoft employee fired for violating groupthink [macnn.com].

Re:GM to VW as Mac to Linux

[fm6]

Not true, actually. You can license it, and a lot of people have done a good job of reverse-engineering it. What's undocumented -- and impossible to reproduce -- is all the subtle ways that Word uses that format.

Re:Macs have a purpose

[Endive4Ever]

Schools are throwing out 7300s and even beige G3's now. I got a skid of that sort of machine, though there were only two or three G3's, for $15 about a month ago. People still buy stuff that old on eBay if you price it right.

I don't think schools are accepting that kind of hardware any longer.

MS Mac BU notes

[themexican]

If you look over the last 10 years the MS Mac Business Unit has a pretty good record of releasing ground breaking software that then languishes. The question is whether this happens because of larger Microsoft/Apple squabbles or simply because of corporate negligence.

Explorer 5 for the Mac OS 9 was groundbreaking in it's support for web standards. The Tasman rendering engine really was ahead of it's time especially in the support of CSS and web standards. Also many of it's HI features were several years ahead of it's Windows brother and some features (like sliding drawers and XML based customizable buttons) seem to have been 'borrowed' in OS X. Although it was roundly savaged for being dog slow, the OS X port of Explorer helped legitimize OS X (even today it still is the best browser for rendering MS friendly websites). Given the state of development tools at the time (and OS X itself) just the fact that the port worked was a big deal, but MS has since let the browser die blaming competition from Safari. I think it's obvious that MS killed Explorer as a screw you to Apple, but my guess is that we'll have a better Safari as a result.

Starting with Office 98, the Mac versions of Word, Excel, and to a lesser extent Powerpoint have consistently surpassed the Windows versions in terms of usability and design. While the program has evolved little (even through it's OS X port) since 98, it's a workhorse that helps keep the Mac a viable corporate machine. The best thing the Mac BU did for the Mac OS was to make Office documents data compatible across platforms. Back in the late nineties when everyone was thinking the Mac platform was dying more than any other software this version of office and the cross platform documents it produced helped restore confidence in the Mac. Today this platform agnosticism seems to finally be breaking down (Office for Mac can't open some of the latest Office XP documents... but then again neither can older versions of Office for Windows. Also the files produced by the forthcoming Office for Mac will not necessarily be data compatible--you will have to run a check for compatibility instead of the document degrading gracefully). Evil plot or progress. You decide.

Entourage is the grown up version of Outlook Express which itself is the child of the much beloved Claris Emailer (the author was recruited by MS and Emailer's basic form and function were kept intact. While it's showing it's age, for my money, Entourage is still the best power user email solution for OS X (Apple's Mail has surpassed Entourage in junk mail filtering but is still behind in basic mail management especially for users with multiple addresses). Entourage's lack of full Exchange support is it's major flaw and the decision to not include this support seems to be politically motivated. I believe this presents an opportunity to third party developers as there are thousands of users looking for native OS X Exchange support. Otherwise as a personal mail manager Entourage runs circles around Outlook for Windows XP which seems primitive in comparison.

MSN for OS X is a bit of a joke. I'm not sure I've ever met a single person who uses it. It's feature poor (compared to it's windows cousin) and buggy. Especially galling is that you can only log on if you use MSN as your ISP. There are many ISPs (Verizon for example) that give you free MSN email addresses and theoretically should allow you to use this browser, but only a a Windows MSN client is allowed for login.

It will be interesting to see what the Mac BU does with Virtual PC. Most mac users feel that if Connectix was still at the help that we would have a G5 version of the program already available. Also regular updates seem to have just dried up. Will VPC still be a source of innovation or will it just languish... Again happenstance or evil plot? Hard to say.

Anyway the point of all this is that innovation does come out of the Mac BU but then programs are allowed to linger for years between updates and widely reported bugs are al

I can't help but smile at my former co-workers

[JayBonci]

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)

Re:I can't help but smile at my former co-workers

[JayBonci]

No, and there are reasons for each one of the things it doesn't have.

No Outlook: Has Entourage and Exchange client for Mac. Mac BU used to do Mac OE, but Entourage is basically that with Calendaring and other office integrations

No Project: There's no market for it. Project is niche on windows.

Access: Access is too windows specific, and there's no market room for it. Everyone uses FileMaker Pro, of which there are huge amounts of import and conversion functions for in Excel. I think you can convert mdb files to FileMaker (but my memory is fuzzy)

If there isn't a market for it, don't spend millions on dev time, pm time, testing time, localization, and then support costs in porting it. That's simply the nature of commerical software.

--jay

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

I have three machines, all on top of my desk, and I use them all everyday. Well, except for the pc, maybe I use that every couple of days. But I use both of the macs every day. Did I mention I accumulated all of this on a college student's budget (without commiting any felonies)?