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.
The silent majority will appreciate the better result.
It's painful when schedules slip. It's even more painful when paying customers end up with buggy software.
Stick to your guns! :-)
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.
Well, I have to say I am disappointed and I am not happy.
Of course now the usual list of excuses now comes up, and we will have to swallow them.
To help the cause, I ONCE AGAIN offer the MacBU team to do some Beta test for you.
I am a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, Small Business Specialist and MBS Dynamics GP RMS CRM Partner with a Windows SBS 2003 setup plus 2 Windows 2003 R2 servers, about 20 PCs and 3 Macs in our domain.
I believe this scenario fits very much the target market for a 'corporate' Office for Mac user and I believe our feedback could help MacBU deliver a good product the first time around. Take it or leave it.
Now, the stakes here are high, MacBU is promising a good product on a first release out the door... ¿or was this just an excuse for a poorly planned project? I hope not.
I wish you the best, I know these decisions are very hard, but I cannot conceal my disappointment.
Godsped
My email is
emxgarcia@mac.com
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.
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.
I just did so.. let's see what happens.
Whaaaaa! I won't get Office 2008 tomorrow! Whaaaa!
Heh-heh.
Oh, I'm still on Office v. X, so no sweat off my brow.
Actually, I'm glad that Office 2008 won't come out until January of next year, because...follow me here...it will actually come out in the year 2008! It makes sense! Hurrah for sanity!
Now, if someone had dropped that little bomb on Apple, perhaps we would actually have iWork '07 and iLife '07, instead of '08 versions.
Seriously though, don't release it until it's ready.
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!
:)