通过

Catch-22

  • 项目

We've made the difficult decision to delay Office:Mac 2008. We're targeting Macworld Expo in January for its general release. Craig (who's certainly earning his paycheque this week) posted to our blog at 5:20 this morning: Office 2008 Coming January 2008.

We've been caught in a Catch-22. If we shipped this year as originally planned, we wouldn't've had the quality that we wanted. We would have been stuck in a firestorm of negative feedback that Microsoft (and, more specifically, MacBU) can't get anything right. But delaying the release means that we're still in the same firestorm of negative feedback, and it has remarkably the same content.

This is one of the costs of making software that is highly visible and is used by millions of people. We'll weather this firestorm, and release Office:Mac 2008 when it's ready. Doing anything else would harm our customers.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    August 02, 2007
    The silent majority will appreciate the better result.

  • Anonymous
    August 02, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 03, 2007
    Your very hard work must make particularly difficult for you and your colleagues to hear so much negative feedback.  As one person has said, no interest at all would be far, far worse. Please get us a great product.  We can wait for a great product. We are disappointed (but probably not as much as you are!) Thanks for the hard, hard work.

  • Anonymous
    August 06, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 06, 2007
    My email is emxgarcia@mac.com

  • Anonymous
    August 06, 2007
    Since you have such a great existing relationship with Microsoft, you should talk to your account manager about our beta programme.  We're adding more beta participants as we progress through our beta, and the account reps will have the first opportunity to add more participants to our beta as we go forward.   Since we have a small team, we have to carefully manage our beta programme.  We accept beta participants as our time and resources allow.  It doesn't do a lot of good to have a lot of beta participants in our programme if we can't adequately handle the feedback.  As I'm sure that you can imagine, managing a beta programme is a lot of time and effort on our part: tracking the bug reports/suggestions/requests that get logged, ensuring that they're not duplicates of bugs/suggestions/etc that we're already aware of, reproducing the bug, working with the user if we can't reproduce it to learn more about their environment and use scenario, etc.  Adding more participants when we're not ready could actually decrease the quality of our software if we're not able to appropriately handle the feedback that we're receiving.  

  • Anonymous
    August 07, 2007
    It's not so much the slip that upsets folk, it's that Mac users are stuck in this file-format limbo for the next 5-6 months. If the converters were out there already (they should have been priority and released when Office 2007 was) people would not be nearly so upset. The complete lack of any information regarding Exchange compatability really makes folk nervous too.

  • Anonymous
    August 10, 2007
    I just did so.. let's see what happens.

  • Anonymous
    August 10, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 10, 2007
    I hope it won't be a disaster like Windows Vista. Make it right and take it easy. Don't hurry up. Mac Office 2008 will rock the world! :)