Mac Mojo : Working in MacBU

Ship It, Ship It Good

Pat Fox — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 05:10:00 GMT

Hello everyone, I thought this would be good time to jump in and introduce myself. I’m the Director of Marketing and Planning for MacBU – a longtime ‘softie and closing in on my first anniversary in the Macintosh Business Unit. Like most of us in MacBU, I’m a long time Mac user – and this will date me – I set up and staffed the original Mac lab in college, finally saving enough to buy a “Fat Mac” of my own. As they say, the rest is history.

Speaking of history, we announced earlier this week RTM of the English version of Office 2008, with additional languages following right on schedule. What does that mean for my team? Well, we helped the dev teams celebrate (yes, that was me cranking the air raid siren Geoff was hearing.) Beyond that, there’s a lot more cranking to do before we launch January 15th – advertising, PR, launch events, and of course, getting ready for Macworld!

Ah, Macworld. It’s going to be a great show and we’re planning a big presence. First, A Day at the Office – a day-long conference at the Moscone on Monday, January 14th, dedicated to extensive user training on the new Office 2008 for Mac. Tickets are close to sold out, but if you’re quick you might still be able to grab one. We also have conference sessions and hands-on labs where attendees can get great training on the new Office 2008 for Mac.

You won’t miss our big booth on the show floor where we’ll have demo stations set up for you to test drive the new product and theatre presentations every half hour highlighting the most popular new features. Even better, most of MacBU and some of our most knowledgeable MVPs will be on hand to answer your questions. We’ll be hanging out again with the community in our new and improved Blogger Lounge (wireless access this year!) Best of all, the product will be available at retail (and online) starting January 15th in North America (including at that swanky Apple Store close to the Moscone.)

And since this is a year to celebrate - we’re the exclusive sponsors of the Macworld Blast at the Warfield Theatre this year, where we’ll have our blow-out launch party Tuesday, January 15th.

This will be a fun night. Long before Office 2008 was on the drawing board, before Mark Mothersbaugh contributed to Art of Office and way before Craig published his “Ship It” lyrics. I was a big fan of our surprise musical guests for the evening…DEVO! (Well, not such a surprise anymore. Sherjo couldn’t keep it from Shawn King on Your Mac Life during an interview with Paul Kent from IDG Wednesday night.)

Now we’re all excited, but I’m not your casual spudboy; there’s ample evidence of my devotion even back in college, as one look at my senior yearbook photo will prove. If you don’t know the band or have never seen DEVO live, do yourself a favor and get one of the few tickets left. The first 300 attendees will get a special gift bag with some limited edition goodies cooked up by Mark Mothersbaugh and my team, so get there early!

This will be a party to remember – and I hope to see you there! Look for the guy wearing the energy dome...

Pat O

Longest remote home folder test … 600 miles…

ExCntx — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 11:13:00 GMT

Sorry it’s been so long since my last post, but I’ve been quite busy fixing bugs which are either old, new, borrowed and quite far away. In fact some are so far away it takes driving all the way to Burbank, CA to verify the fix.

I’ve spent a good number of weeks working on fixing a variety of Remote Home Folder bugs. If you are not sure what I am talking about you can read about it here: Apple Server Desktop Management. The basic idea is that all user directories live on a remote server. This allows anyone to log into any Apple Macintosh connected to the business or university network and have access to their home directory. The idea has been around since UNIX was developed. Unfortunately, when the age and design of your application pre-dates UNIX … okay, not really, but when the application wasn’t designed for this functionality you are guaranteed to run into a few problems along the way.

So why send me? Because I worked on the fix, silly, why else would you send such a shy and demure sort of guy who really doesn’t like people. (If you believe that I’ve got this bridge in Brooklyn that I just put on the market.) Seriously though, sending me all the way to Burbank to test a fix, and make me drive there to boot? What’s up with that?

The reason I went was because one of the known issues for enterprise and schools was the performance impact of running the Office applications when a user had a Remote Home Folder (RHF). Having spent my time working on emulators, video games and lots of other stuff that I can’t talk about, performance is my middle name. I was tasked, as well as a few other people with focusing on Remote Home Folder issues for this next version and getting things put right.

Reproducing the RHF bugs in our lab proved quite the challenge. The configurations we were trying to test with either differed in network bandwidth, network hardware, Mac OS software versions or even computer hardware versions. On top of that, some customers had a few users or 10,000 users. Trying to narrow down the configuration so we could reproduce the problem involved a great deal of creativity on our part. So when we have a customer close enough to our team that can try out our fixes it’s a great benefit to us and them!

So, back to the bug. Everyone out there that remembers Get1Resource and PBGetCatInfo, go get yourself a cookie … on me. Everyone who doesn’t know what those are, well I am about to explain why these two functions caused us a great deal of pain. Older applications for the Mac OS, think pre-OS X, used resource forks and resource files. These resource forks/files contained icons, data, code, window layouts, strings, etc. The way you could scan these files is by using the combination of these two old Apple APIs.

When Office launches, we scan all of the office applications, reading resource forks and collecting information to shove in the User Preferences for the suite, essentially building up caches. When you install Mac Office 2004, there are over 3000 files. On your local hard drive, this scan can take anywhere from 25 seconds to over a minute (depending completely on hardware). See where I’m going with this? Remember what I said about RHF and application design. Networks are not as fast as hard drives, no matter what anyone tells you, reading/scanning 3000+ files over the network is a bit of a slow thing to do. Some customers were reporting it would take up to 10 minutes to launch our application using RHF.

Now in Mac Office 2008, we have done a great deal of modernization across the board. No longer are we using resource forks and files. We have created application bundles, library frameworks and are completely Mach-O. Unfortunately with doing this, the number of files is now upwards of 20,000. That might seem like a lot, but considering that Safari and iTunes install about 4700 & 5800 files respectively, 20,000 files is not too bad for something as large as Office. (If you are interested in checking, try the following: Open Terminal; type cd /Applications; type find ./iTunes.app –name “*” | wc –l)

The reason behind this is that resource forks and files are now broken up into a single file per resource. Needless to say, if launching Office 2004 with RHF was slow it got much worse in Office 2008. If you were reading carefully, you would have noticed I said, “When Office launches.” Yeah, we discovered every time Office is launched it scans all the files, to verify the integrity of the caches it has build. That problem on top of the fact that we now had 20,000 files caused our performance to drop even further. This is where the team I work with started attacking the problem. It took a lot of digging, using Shark, our own internal debugging tools and really trying to understand what was going on, since the people who worked on this code I think left the company when ADA was created. After a great deal of work, many hours spent with stop watches and testers configuring lab machines, we were able to get the launch times down to 20 seconds or so depending on your machine, no matter if you are using RHF or not. Of course that was in our lab, which is why we needed to make a trip to a customer to test out all our hard work.

But why take a road trip? Burbank is a quick flight from our offices. Simply put, pregnant women don’t fly. My wife and I were expecting our first child and she had to be in San Diego for the week. Being the diligent husband, and actually really wanting to check out the San Diego office (which by the way doesn’t suck), I decided to drive down with her and along the way; I could stop by our valuable customer and verify our fix. This leads me back to why I drove all the way down to Burbank.

Watching the fix work in front of customers is a great feeling. I could say more about the visit, but there’s that implant in the back of my neck that hurts when I talk/type too much about things I’m not allowed to … ouch! They were quite happy with the results, and even happier that I was able to get another serious remote home folder bug fixed after I saw a problem they were having because we hadn’t seen it in our lab. That’s the great benefit of testing in a real world environment.

It was quite satisfying for me and the team: Stephen Shaw, Steven Splinter and Kirk Engelmeier to get this fixed for our customers.

Here's to the Crazy Ones

blairn — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 20:00:00 GMT

As many of you know, MacBU celebrated our own 10 year anniversary earlier this year. As you may also be aware, we're also celebrating the 10 year anniversary of the Apple "Think Different" advertising campaign which debuted September 28, 1997.

You know when you've stumbled into MacBU territory at Microsoft because of all the Think Different posters on the walls. We've really got quite a collection, including Alfred Hitchcock, Maria Callas, Frank Sinatra, Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Amelia Earhart, Richard Feynman, and many others. Many of these framed originals greet us every day, and some have become like old friends - a welcome part of our daily experience.

We recently surveyed MacBU team members for their thoughts about the various Think Different campaign posters that we share. Here are some of our responses.

Albert Einstein

A patent clerk defining space and time, that's "Thinking Different"
He really thought outside of the box and didn't care what others thought about his ideas.
Who better than Einstein to represent Thinking Different -- he changed the face of science with thought experiments and equations rolling through his consciousness. He's also cuddly.

Mohandas Gandhi

How can one not be inspired by Gandhi? I don't know what to say about him that won't sound trite, but I'll try anyway. When I look at a picture of him, and think about what he accomplished and equally important how he accomplished it, I'm inspired and moved.
Gandhi didn't just verbalize or write about his different way of life, he lived it. That's something very different indeed. He's life inspires me.
Making revolution against tyranny is hardly a new idea. But to lead a revolution with non-violence showed that Gandhi could Think Different and by doing so, change the destiny of nations.
This poster welcomes me every morning I walk into the building. The simple and quiet way Gandhi is reading/writing his thoughts, being focused -- tunes me in for the rest of the day.

Pablo Picasso

There are some many great "Think Different" posters, but I like the Picasso one for the way he has impacted the Art world. There have been a variety of art styles, but Picasso really had a pretty different way of approaching art.

Lucy & Desi

They set such a new trend in comedy and entertainment that lead in a positive way to more fun and enjoyment as other comedians followed that lead. Very creative, revolutionary, enjoyable.

Jackie Robinson

It's the rock solid handshake. No doubt in my mind, no matter what's happening on the field or off, those two are teammates. Considering the social climate of that time and place, that really is thinking different.

Jim Henson & Kermit

Jim Henson completely re-defined puppetry as people knew it and changed it from something just to amuse small children into an entertainment form that was enjoyable for all ages.
Jim Henson was a modern genius in the field of looking at things from the 'wrong' angle. His earliest attempts at entertainment came in the form of hostile and aggressive advertising. His work with the Muppets over the years has tackled social issues in manners that could be termed subversive. But everything was always done with a smile of innocence and honesty. The poster for Think Different is one of the rare pictures of Jim with his alter ego, Kermit. The voice that challenged racism, "It's not easy being green." There is timelessness to the photo that reminds us all that any answer can be the right one.

And finally, a small homage to the last 10 years of thinking different and many more years to come.

                         Here's
                        to the
      crazy ones,      the       misfits,
   the rebels, the troublemakers. The round
 pegs in the square holes.  The ones who see 
things differently. They're not fond of rules, 
and they have no respect for the status
quo. You can quote them. Disagree with 
them.  Glorify or vilify them.  About 
 the only thing you can't do is ignore
  them. Because they change things. They 
   push the human race forward. And while some 
    may see them as the crazy ones, we see g-
     enius. Because the people who are crazy
      enough to think they can change the
       world are the        ones who do.

Wait, wait, I'm here

CraigE — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 20:46:00 GMT

My first blog post, while written by yours truly, wasn't posted by yours truly - my marketing team created an account for me and posted the blog entry so we could make sure it happened in a timely way during the frenzy of my first day. With the initial scramble over, I now have control over my account - so now I can post for myself, comment for myself - it's like I'm my own person. Watch out! :-).

First of all, I have now had 4 weeks on the job, and I am happy to report that I couldn't be more delighted with my decision to come to MacBU - the energy and passion in the team is truly inspiring. Our customers are in great hands.

I’ve had a chance to get caught up on all the various comments in this blog to date and I have seen a lot feature suggestions. I really appreciate them – I love it when folks take the time to share their view on our products. It’s inspiring to me to see how much people care about MacBU’s products.

I’ve also seen a lot of requests for dates and I wanted to address that. We simply can’t answer these requests in a precise manner – all we can do is identify rough time frames. It isn’t that we are being secretive or cruel - shipping software as complex as Mac Office is half art, half science, and calling a precise date way in advance is next to impossible. In some cycles where we’re just choosing what features to deliver we can target a date with more precision by cutting back on our ambitions. This release is more than just features that we could prioritize and cut – among other things, we have new file formats and are building universal binaries for our entire Office suite. Our entire team wants to ship great products that people love to use, and that means making sure the products work great. So while I appreciate that people want it now (believe me, we all want it now) and if not now, people want to know exactly when, I’m afraid that right now, all I can say is, we’re working hard and stay tuned.

So right now I know that folks want our software and that our users have lots of great feature ideas – I love it. I’d also love to have a broader dialog with y’all – so over to you, what do you want to hear from me?

power to the programmers

nadyne — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 19:53:00 GMT

This week is Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference. WWDC is the world's largest gathering of Apple developers. Here in the Moscone Centre in beautiful downtown San Francisco, there are 5000 developers, plus another 1200 engineers from Apple. The whole week is devoted to Apple helping its developers create better Mac software.

As a user experience researcher, I'm not a code jockey. There's a lot for me here at WWDC anyway. I'm learning about new OS technologies and how we might be able to plug into them. There are open labs where I can chat with Apple engineers to learn more. Oh, and there are comfortable chairs in the common areas, where I get to meet my fellow WWDC attendees. This is my favourite part about attending WWDC: chatting with the other developers here, learning about their favourite sessions, and generally basking in the geekiness that is 5000 developers all together in one building. There's a lot to learn, there's a lot to share, and the energy that's here is absolutely fantastic.

This year, WWDC falls at right at the time when we're working the hardest on shipping Office 2008. Some members of our team have carved out a day (or even just a few hours!) to come to WWDC and attend the sessions that will have the most impact on them for our future work. We don't get to spend as much time here at WWDC this week as we would normally, but we want to know what's coming next and think about what we can do in the future. On Monday, I attended the keynote with some members of the PowerPoint team, and we spent the whole time whispering ideas to each other about what we think we could do in the version after Office 2008 with the Leopard features that Steve demoed.

There are lots of other ideas going around WWDC, too. I went to a session today that included a song break. The Apple engineers were on stage with guitars singing about Cocoa. Maybe that's an idea we should consider for our booth at Macworld Expo in January 2008 ...

Hello from the new General Manager of the Macintosh Business Unit - Craig Eisler

CraigE — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 19:08:00 GMT

Hi folks,

Wow! I can’t believe I’m actually here - General Manager of Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit. I would not have guessed this is where I would’ve landed when I rejoined Microsoft. But after looking at several great options over the course of the past couple months, I jumped at the Mac BU opportunity when I heard about it.

Why Mac BU? What first got my attention was the fact that it was a fantastic business focused on delivering great technology. As an Office for Mac user, I already knew we had a terrific set of products, and as I dug in, I discovered there was a terrific team of passionate people dedicated to innovation and excellence. Furthermore, Apple and Microsoft are great partners (have been for over 20 years), and there is still more we and Apple can do together. When I put all of that stuff together, it presented a very compelling opportunity. But the icing on the cake - the thing that I love - is the chance to work on Mac products and to get to work with Apple. I have been an Apple fan and Mac user for years – check out my recent blog posting: top ten things from Apple I love.

Microsoft and Apple are both great companies in their own right, and working in Mac BU, I get to experience the best of both worlds.

I am super excited to help Mac BU continue to rock the house with Office 2008 for Mac and beyond.

Craig

ship it!

nadyne — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 00:47:00 GMT

Here's a secret of software development. You're never actually done with your software. There's always one more feature to add, one more button to tweak, one more change to make.

The end of a cycle is an odd time. Everyone is hard at work. The developers are finishing up their features and fixing bugs. The testers are ruthlessly hunting down bugs. The program managers are prioritising those bugs. The user experience researcher (hey, that's me!) is planning the final studies of Office 2008 for Mac.

But there's a problem. The people involved really love their jobs and have an unparalleled passion for excellence. 'How can that be a problem?!' I hear you ask. This is a problem because of feature creep. I hear it all the time. 'You know, if we just had a couple more days, we could do [more cool stuff]. What's a couple more days?' The devs come up with these ideas as they're working on the code. The testers come up with these ideas when they find a bug and come up with an elegant solution to the problem. The PMs come up with these ideas when they look at the lists of possibilities for their areas. And yes, I do it too: I conduct a usability test and think of a great approach to a particular scenario that I observed in the lab.

The end of a cycle is hard because you have to clamp down on these kinds of things, and it's hard to say no to a good idea from someone who deeply cares. Several feature creeps have crept into my office in the past month, brought in by people who have great ideas and want to get a UX perspective on their idea. Each of these feature creeps only take a couple of days, maybe a week, to fully realise. But the sum of all of these tweaks and additions and improvements that have crept into my office is easily six months, and I know that I haven't heard all of the ideas that have come up.

Creating a suite of products that have the scope of Office for Mac is a difficult mission. To make this mission somewhat easier, we have to decide how we're going to focus our efforts. This is decided early on in the project and is based on lots of research to understand and prioritise user needs and requests. It gets refined as we go along. When ideas come up, aside from considering their impact to the schedule, we have to figure out how they fit into our focus. If they're not quite on target with our focused priorities, the end of the cycle is when we're more likely to regretfully say 'no'. If the idea is on target, then a hard conversation starts: how do we fit this great idea into our product without having a significant impact on our schedule? It's always a delicate balancing act, and it gets more and more delicate as we get closer and closer to launching Office.

There's a growing refrain in the hallways whenever feature creep rears its attractive and tempting head: 'Ship it!' I'm hearing it more and more. We've all heard Steve Jobs' legendary "real artists ship" -- and that spirit is alive and well here and now. It's really hard to say no to cool things even when they come late in the game, but at some point, you have to realise that you don't have an infinite number of hours in a day and that you can't do everything that you want to do. This time.

Every day, we get closer and closer to being able to ship it. I'm looking forward to that day. Until we ship it, we have to avoid the siren song of feature creep. The good part about your software never being done is that some of us are already working on the version after Office 2008 for Mac, and all of these (and so much more!) will get their due consideration based on research and customer feedback (isn't this where I came in?).

Birthday Gift for MacBU

David Weiss — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 04:11:00 GMT

Yesterday, as I walked from the dark parking garage to begin my day of work, I remembered that we were celebrating MacBU's 10th anniversary! The clouds were thinning and I looked around to see if perchance, the cloudy weather would abate, even a little bit for our big party. As I looked up I saw this:

Thrilled, I just had to find out who had created such a master piece of pixel art. I've tried my hand at building stuff like this, but the quality of this work was simply fantastic. I soon discovered that Joe LeBlanc, the very same that helped me earlier with my pixelated Apple logo and famous for the G4 Cube aquarium, was the mastermind behind the window decorations and birthday gift to MacBU. Joe along with Jessica Lambert and Matt Elggren (aka Mel) had arrived at our building at 6 AM in order to set this up, but the project was much more work than what happened this morning, so I took my trusty MacBook Pro and donned my reporter hat to interview all three about what it was like to do this, behind the scenes. What follows is the verbatim transcript of the interview.

David Weiss: What prompted you to do this?

Joe LeBlanc: I just wanted to give all of MacBU a gift, from my heart.

David: What time did you get here?

Joe: I picked up Mel at 5:45 AM, we all got here at 6:00 AM.

David: Wow, that's devotion.

Mel: You know, you do what you got to do.

David: How did you design it?

Joe: In Excel of course. (Editorial Note: Joe is on the Excel Test team.)

David: They really look great. So how did you start?

Joe: Well, I had the idea in January. I had seen other game themed block art before, I thought we could do it. I took our icons, scaled them down in Photoshop, then reduced the colors and made them blocky. I manually adjusted the blocks for inconsistencies and then brought them over to Excel.

David: Excel? How did you use Excel?

Joe: Easy. After having measured the windows and the size of the stickies,

David: What? Those are all stickies?

Joe: Yup.

David: How many?

Joe: 1300.

David: 1300, exactly?

Joe: 1336, actually. I used the COUNTIF function in Excel.

David: The wow is now! That's amazing! So what about Excel? How did you use Excel to design the presentation?

Joe: First I used conditional formatting, 1 being black, 0 being white to match what was sketched out in the Photoshop image. Then I realized I needed to flip it horizontally so it looked right from the outside of the building, so I switched the top corners, then used auto-fill from the outsides in, then top down.

David: I'm stunned. What next?

Joe: I did this for each of the icons, then the numbers, which I used Ariel, because it looked the best as a 13pt non-antialiased font. Then I formatted to print 1 icon for each page as a guide for each person. We had 3 people, so we each did 2 icons then helped each other finish the numbers.

David: Can others try this?

Joe: Sure, just use the Excel screenshots as your guide and send us a link to a picture of your icon art!

David: Using stickies for internal marketing seems remarkably fiscally responsible. Was that part of your thinking?

Joe: Naturally we try to make the best use of our resources at hand.

David: Mel, how do you feel about this experience?

Mel: I was just happy to be along for the ride. It was a thrill! I was up until 1 AM. I couldn't sleep because of the excitement! I always wanted to know what it was like to be a video card, and well, now I know.

David: Jessica, what was the hardest part of all this?

Jessica: Getting up in the morning! I was here at 6 AM. That's early! We got here and I couldn't believe there were other people awake this early! Seriously, I'm short, so I was using a chair and I fell of it. But I'm okay.

David: No workman's comp claims in the wings?

Jessica: Oh no, I'm just fine. So beside the vertical challenges, it was hard to keep everything in a straight line. After doing a few icons, we went outside to see how it looked and we had to raise my icons a pixel, but that wasn't too hard, just took one from the bottom and moved it to the top.

David: Joe, as the master mind behind all this, were you nervous?

Joe: Actually, I had a nightmare that I showed up late and the guys that were here to help me were William H. Macy and the guy that plays Mac in the Mac vs. PC commercials. Mr. Macy was just being a jerk and messing up everything and it ended up in complete disaster. Then I woke up. I felt good knowing that the worst possible outcome had already happened in my dreams, so I knew it would go well.

David: Okay. So, what was it like working early in the morning?

Joe: It was interesting. Some folks got here while we were not yet finished and would look up at us working on the icons and just smile. Others would just look down at the ground and not even notice. When we were outside taking pictures and making sure it looked pixel perfect, some people would ask, "What's that?" and "I see a Messenger icon, but what's the other stuff?" Someone else asked "What is QWIPX?"

David: The MacBU shares the building with a bunch of Microsoft's main IT staff, what do you think they think about all this?

Joe: Well, I think they're used to it. I mean, they've had to see all our Think Different posters when they walk in each day. We get along just fine.

David: What was the biggest technical challenge?

Joe: Color was hard. We could find blue, yellow, green and pink stickies in the storage room, but we needed purple and orange for Entourage and PowerPoint. Jessica bought a couple of packages of purple and orange, but to get the right effect we had to dither the different colors in those logos. So color was a challenge, but I’d say keeping things straight was harder.

David: So what does the future hold?

Joe: I don't know. We are going to have to come up with something even cooler when we ship Office 2008.

David: I can't wait.

Joe: Neither can I.

Confessions of a Mac Switcher at Microsoft

blairn — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 05:30:00 GMT

Hi. My name is Blair and I'm a switcher.

I guess it all started around OS X. I'd been working in a Linux shop for a little while. On DOS and Windows before that. I was already hooked on the command line, but couldn't find a windowing environment that kept me satisfied. That's when a friend of mine first turned me on to OS X. All the power of the command line that I was used to from Linux but with the tastiest UI I'd ever seen! I was hooked after trying OS X just once. I've been using Macs and OS X ever since.

I knew I'd need to get my own Mac if I was going to use OS X the way I wanted to. A friend sold me his used 500 MHz G4 TiBook for $500. The thing was all beat up: Cracked hinge, broken latch (replaced with Velcro), missing command key, combo drive that made a lot of scratching noise (not to mention scratched up discs), and a downgraded 2Gb hard drive. I was sold. I upgraded the hard drive and bought an external CD-RW drive. I had to install OS X from another Mac with my PowerBook in Firewire mode, but that's all the work I had to do and that first PowerBook is running great even today.

My roommate and I used to joke about what a perfect Switcher ad our house would make. We counted the retired PCs in our attic: 14 in various configurations, but every last one of the powered down. We were doing all our work on one PowerBook each. We didn't need the recognition or the fame of an Ellen Feiss. Running OS X was all we really needed, and one PowerBook each to keep us happy.

I ended up being recruited to Microsoft for the pizza. True story. I'd gone back to college and wouldn't normally have attended the recruiting event, but I was hungry and, hey - free pizza. I told everybody at Microsoft that I use Mac OS X. It was cool. Nobody judged. Everybody seemed to think it was all right. I even met a few other Microsoft people that use OS X the way I do. I went ahead with a 3-month internship and by the time I was done with that internship I was hooked on Microsoft as well. It's just an amazing company to work for. Whenever I'd talk about OS X, or Apple, or my PowerBook, people would just be interested in hearing another opinion. Microsoft's been super cool.

I worked on Visual Studio for a few years. My old roommate kept sending me Microsoft job postings for MacBU. "If you're going to work at Microsoft, at least work for these guys," he'd say. "No way, man. I'm happy where I'm at," or, "It's cool here," I'd say. But my situation changed after a few years and I decided to give the MacBU a shot. Now I'm a Program Manager working on Mac PowerPoint. It's been great! MacBooks, Mac Pros and PowerPCs everywhere you look, and all the OS X I can handle. I'm hooked.

Introducing a “certain je-ne-sais-quoi”

eric.paquin — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 14:29:00 GMT

A new year, a new blogger! Today’s post is all about me! I’m taking the plunge in the Mojo so let me introduce myself! I’m Eric Paquin, International Project Manager and totally new to the art of blogging (please be patient)! So, what can I bring to the Mojo? I’ll focus on the international perspective. Being a French Canadian (aka Québécois) living in Ireland (I’ll spare you the long story ;) ) it gives me an interesting viewpoint on all things international (well… most)!

Mac head since 1989 (but also a PC user)… I’ve been working in localization for over 10 years. I was a tester in Corel – they had their localization centre in Dublin then. And I have been in the Ireland branch of MacBU for the last 7 years, first in test and now as a project manager.

In the past, one thing I was never good at was using French products (on Mac or PC) as historically (many moons ago), it used to take near 6 months after the release of the English product - not only for Microsoft products - to have the privilege to install it in French in Canada… Then once I started to install French products, I was really confused being used to the English terminology.

Things have change and for the last 3 years, my primary Mac at work is fully French! Talk about putting my software where my mouth is ;) It helps me understanding issues that our international users might run into. It also made me realize that most software I use have issues when you run them in another language. Especially highlighted when you have a configuration like this (in System preferences/International):

French Canadian CSA keyboard
Ireland (French) international format
GMT / 24 hour clock

About localization in Dublin… (I won’t cover the whole process - Schwieb has already given a good overview). Who are we? We are a team responsible for 6 languages (namely French, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish and Dutch). For Office 2004, each of these languages contained an average of 100000 new and updated words (translation we could not recycle from previous versions) in the software. To add a new language like we did for Dutch and Italian, it means 300000 words and another 750000 for the help. We released the software in various flavours – Standard Edition, Student and Teacher, Volume Licensing, Word and Excel Standalone in some languages, Entourage standalone for Volume Licensing, Test Drive. Altogether, for Office 2004, we were responsible for signing off on 23 CDs for Office and 15 for VPC (Virtual PC). We also localize Messenger, RDC (Remote Desktop Client) and all the various software updates…

That’s a lot… We couldn’t do it without automation and working with vendors on the translation part and some of the testing… In a future post, I’ll give an overview of the problems this causes, how we work around these and a quick overview of some of the tools we use.

I have a few more ideas for future posts but I would also like to hear from you if there are any particular international topics you’d like me to get into a little more… These include:

Differences between European markets and the US – is it day and night or more like 13h and 1PM?
International Features I’d like to see (and hopefully you do to!)
Communications with our European customers
And, pourquoi pas, “Le Mojo” – an occasional post in French?

Until the next time…

Au revoir!

A day in the life, usability edition

nadyne — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 04:26:00 GMT

A few weeks ago, Brad told us what a day in his life is like. Inspired by Brad, here's a day in the life of a user experience researcher. My days are highly variable, depending on whether I'm doing a usability study or not, so I'm not sure if this description is typical of one of my days, let alone any other user experience researcher's day.

7:30am - Compared to Brad, I sleep in. I have a shorter commute than he does -- about 10 minutes, maybe 15 if the traffic lights aren't cooperating or if I stop for a coffee or Jamba Juice on the way in.

8:30am - I got into this habit when I had a longer commute. I always check my email before I leave home. I tell myself that it's so that I know when my first meeting is, but I spend much more time reading/responding to email than checking my calendar. One of the items in this morning's email tells me that our Redmond campus is closed today due to snow. I'm torn between being jealous that they got a snow day and happy that I live in the Bay Area and thus snow is something that happens to other people. Somehow I manage to spend an hour reading and responding to email.

9:30am - This is a fifteen-minute commute day. I need coffee.

10am - Meeting #1 is with my contractor. I'm about to go on vacation for most of December (yay!), so we're mapping out all of the work that needs to be done between now and mid-January: working with the app teams to ensure that our usability recommendations for previous studies are included in the final products, creating the task lists for our next two usability studies, and recruiting for usability participants at Macworld Expo in January. (And don't forget that you can sign up to participate in usability studies, too.)

11am - Meeting #2 is with the other PowerPoint leads: program management, development, test, marketing, and user assistance. We're all working hard on Magnesium (that's our codename for Office 12), and our status for that is the major topic of conversation today. We also agree on when I'll run my next usability test.

noon - The email gods are never appeased, and they have delivered another eleventy billion into my inbox. Sigh. Some of the email is from snowbound Redmonders who are apparently losing their sanity due to the cold.

1pm - The email gods deliver good news in the form of my 2pm meeting being cancelled. Oh thank goodness. I have some time to catch up on my to-do list, and I blast through many of them: write up my weekly status report for my manager, make a first pass at prioritising the usability findings from my last Entourage study, make a first pass at prioritising the usability findings from my last PowerPoint study, write most of this blog post.

3pm - Meeting with my manager. I ask him to hold down the fort while I'm gone. I hope he doesn't let the teams make a new UI element bright pink or blinking ...

4pm - And the meetings are done for the day. I have another chance to get things done, so I do: review a few things and send feedback, respond to some of the email, help out an Entourage PM with a question he has about laying out a dialog, chat with the PowerPoint lead PM about an upcoming meeting, chat with the PowerPoint lead dev about the differences between interviewing a candidate for an intern and a full-time position. I wrap up the day by writing up my to-do list for tomorrow so that I don't forget what I really need to get done first.

5:30pm - I duck out of the office to attend a Barenaked Ladies concert in San Francisco. Good night!

Living complexity

Geoff Price — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 23:16:00 GMT

Brad's Carl Sagan-style post on code size stirs up some familiar questions about complexity management here at MacBU. With every release of Office, we remove, rewrite and add new code. Often we can remove significant amounts of code without losing functionality – say, remove use of a custom HTML renderer when the OS offers a built-in one instead. I recall how many of us took it as a badge of pride during the Carbon transition of Office v.X that after a year of intensive coding our net contribution in terms of new lines of code was significantly negative. Those were the days, hacking and rewriting. But of course, as the total functionality of the suite increases over time, the total volume of code used to build it tends to inevitably follow. There has been a lot of functionality added in twenty years.

Is it necessary? It's pretty easy to find people who agree that Office has more functionality than they personally need. Where the agreement tends to fall apart is when you ask what the first feature to be cut should be, at which point one person's "bloat" is another's "only feature I use every day". It's also nice to know the functionality and compatibility is there, as you find the need or the advantages of it. I use all of our apps every day, not to test but just to get work done – Exchange-based mail and calendaring in Entourage, analyzing data and lists in Excel, IMing over corp chat – it's an interesting job being able to use the software every day to talk about the job of making the software. My Office skills were pretty minimal when I got here, but (and some coworkers might smirk at this) they've come a long way. You may not have heard of (say) pivot tables, but once you start using them for certain kinds of analysis you can't imagine how you ever lived without them.

Of course, our goal isn't to just pile features on top of features, but to harness the increasing power in the suite with an effective and focused user experience that puts functionality in reach and in context. In some cases that can be pretty easy, but generally it's actually pretty hard, and something we have to think about with everything we do.

Is it slow? Generally, there's no linear relationship, where adding 10% code means everything is 10% slower. There's quite a lot of engineering happening down at the metal to swap in the currently executing code as the application runs. The problem is in how much work the application is trying to do – if it's trying to do a lot, it's necessarily going to take longer to do. When we work on performance bottleneck areas (such as boot speed) that is generally what we are looking at, i.e. do we really need to be doing all this now? For this release, running native on Intel is orders of magnitude more important for speed than trying to trim raw code size, for example.

Is it sustainable? It's important to understand that while the code has been written and expanded over the past twenty plus years, it has also been tested and validated for twenty plus years. Insane amounts of testing. Stabilized or "baked" code provides a baseline for correctness and quality – as new changes introduce unintended problems (regressions), we know we just need to hunt down which new change is the culprit and understand how it needs to be redone. The real impact is on productivity: while correct, that baked code can vary wildly in how well factored it is (well factored being the opposite of "spaghetti"), and therefore how sensitive to regression. We definitely have some pasta mixed in as part of our overall diet, and we have to develop strategies for dealing with that. Sometimes it's best to simply say "do not disturb the water", but that's not always an option (say, for example, you decide to blow out the Excel cell table.)

Shouldn't we just rewrite it all from scratch, and "do it right" so that *all* of the code is perfectly well factored according to modern sensibility? JoelOnSoftware made some great observations on that topic in this article: Things You Should Never Do, Part I. (I believe link-master Brian sent that to me originally. Pyramid was before my time here so I'll leave it to others to comment on whether Joel's observations on that project are fair and accurate or not.)

Some people keep souvenir copies of tech editorials from ten years ago predicting that Microsoft will be unable to release any further versions of Excel, because the code base has simply gotten too big and Microsoft will have to rewrite it from scratch. That was quite a few releases of Excel ago.

Joel points out that code doesn't rust, but the complexity problem is real because massive change is inevitable if you are trying to keep your software on the leading edge – especially on the Mac. We plan to continue shipping Mac software into the foreseeable future, so it is easy for us to make major architectural decisions with the very long term in mind. Where it gets hard is balancing this against short term customer need – what resources can we apply to deep rearchitecture or local refactoring, given that these resources will not be available to solve the most pressing problems that are actually visible to customers? While we made significant investments in future capability earlier in the current product cycle, right now that customer need is pretty extreme and we're 100% focused on getting this release out into the market.

Finding this sort of balance overall, and dealing with this level of complexity in general, is clearly our defining challenge with Office. It takes some time to get your head wrapped around it all. We might go days without seeing a particular new developer, and we'll have to send a veteran search and rescue squad into their area of the code to pull them out. Of course, it doesn't just impact developers, it's in the density of the test cases, the maintenance of the automation, the range of functionality and interactions our designers have to understand, the scope of documentation, the pace of change. Managing complexity is where we live. It's not for everyone, but fortunately I find it all pretty fun at the end of the day... gives my head something to do.

It's all in the numbers ...

ExCntx — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 02:09:00 GMT

A friend of mine and I were shooting the ... breeze (freaking ‘G' ratings for blogs) and he was asking me when the next version of Office was coming out. Now being the wise Microsoft spin doctor that I am, and having spent numerous hours being brainwashed by marketing, p.r. and some guys in black who look like Jessie Ventura and Alex Trebek (anyone get that reference?) I looked him square in the eye and asked, "How many lines of code are there in Mac Office?"

Not to be caught off guard, he stared right back and asked, "You're going to kill me after you tell me, right?" I smiled that Cheshire cat smile I have and said, slowly, "Maybe ...." I let the pause go on for a bit longer than normal and then laughed.

So I changed the subject to movies and after a bit he asked me, "How many lines of code are there in Mac Office?" I looked him and asked, "Do you really want to go there? " He nodded as he moved his lawn chair a little out of arm's reach.

About 30,000,000 lines of code make up the current version of Office that we are developing. That's no typo; in fact, I had to figure that out because of a research project I was working on ... if I told you what it was, I would definitely have to ... oh, yeah, ‘G' ratings ... anyway back to the train of thought.

It's really mind blowing when you think about it. Each developer is responsible for, on average, about 428,000 lines of code. Some people have more areas, some have less, but if you just think of that number, that's a tremendous amount of responsibility per developer. Consider for a moment also that there are probably 10x (yes ten times) or more developers on Windows Office, although I don't know the exact count.

Just to throw another mind-numbing number out at you, there are about 40 lines of text on the page of an average paperback book. That means one developer is responsible for about a 10,700-page book. Or if you break it down smaller, if the average paperback is 300 pages, that means each developer is responsible for about 35 or more paperbacks on his desk. Imagine trying to find a single typo in all those books -- that's what most bugs are, don't ya know!

Rick might have a better guess, but from what I have seen the average life of the code (before this version), was about 12 years, meaning most of the code was written back when 68k and 386 processors ruled the world. A5 bring back any memories for people? What about segmented memory? Why is this important? Read on.

The final killer number that I think is important in answering my question is 50%. What does that number mean? It represents the amount of turnover we have had in our developer organization in the past two years. Let that sink in for a bit: during these past two years we started the move to XCode, then started the move to Intel, brought on about a bunch of new people and asked each of them to learn somewhere on the order of 400,000 lines of code. Most of which was written before some of these new hires started high school! Either that, or they started work on a brand new feature and we pushed all the responsibilities of that code onto people who never saw it before or were already working on other things.

I guess the short answer to my friend's question is that the next version is coming out as fast as we can develop it. Everyone in the MacBU, developers, testers, UA, PM, Loc, and managers are trying to make this the best version of office for both PowerPC and Intel based Macs. But as we have said before on this blog and will continue to say, we're making progress, staying on track and hoping to get this puppy wrapped up and shipped off to you as soon as possible. But for now we're all trying to get through our 35 books trying to find those blasted typos.

Oh, and for the record, I think I have about 50 or so books on my desk ... some are written in OLE ...

A day in my life at the macbu ...

ExCntx — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 23:45:00 GMT

Fair warning, this is not a description of a typical programmer’s day. I am not a typical programmer, in fact my wife constantly reminds me that my sanity is also questionable, but I do love my job and I live quite far from it … oh and I don’t have any children at home.

6:00 am – wake up, roll out of bed, feed the 3 cats in the house and the outdoor cat that has adopted us, start the coffee machine (at most one cup in the morning … before I get to work)

6:30 am – wake the computer from sleep (both Mac laptop and pc, I have 2 PCs and 6 Macs at home … don’t ask how many more are in the closet), launch email, begin stretching exercises, leg kicks, shoulders, back, get the blood flowing

7:00 am (or earlier, depending on much stretching I actually feel like doing) – answer emails from China (we have a dev group there), answer other emails. Check on the build that happened on my Mac (using ARD via VPN to work) and make up the list of things to do for the day.

7:30 am – shower, have breakfast

8:00 am – determine method of transport, either bicycle or commute with one or more fellow MacBU people.

8:30 am – 10:00 am – commute to work. I live in San Francisco; work is in Mountain View … it’s a long ride via train or car, no matter how you slice it.

10:00 am – check email, check bugs and get to work.

I have an 8-way KVM switch, one pc, and four Macs at work, plus the Mac laptop from home. Two of the Macs are x86 based, two are PowerPC based. One of the PowerPC Macs is devoted to the building and debugging Office 11. All the other machines have the latest sources from Office 12. Right now my major responsibility is fixing OLE bugs within our source base. Unfortunately the code is has been through so many changes for this revision, first it was moving to Mach-O, then to XCode and finally to Intel, that I need to run the Office 11 debug builds on one machine and compare them to the Office 12 build on another machine. This way I can hopefully figure out where the bug actually originated from.

After two or so hours of debugging and staring at code I have to eat. We’ve got a pretty decent cafeteria here at the campus, supposedly it’s better than anything in Redmond, but never eating in a Redmond cafeteria I’ll let those bloggers from the north comment on that. There is typically a bunch of us sitting outside on the patio hanging out and talking for anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour, then it’s back to work.

I try and make sure my meetings are all in the afternoon, not that it always works out that way, but usually I’ll have anywhere from 1 to 2 meetings a day in the afternoon, except Tuesdays and Fridays which are typically free (any PM reading this blog who schedules a meeting with me on those days is dead!I’m warning you right now …J

1pm – 5pm – typically a couple meetings, working on bugs, answering more emails and overall trying to stay focused on what needs to get done at the moment.

5pm – anytime after 5 I am figuring out how to get back home, I usually leave work between 5:45 – 7pm depending on driving. If you have ever commuted in the Bay Area you know that if you drive, it doesn’t matter when you leave between 5 and 7, you’re still getting home at the same time, especially from the southbay going north.

8:00 pm – 8:30 pm – usually get home around this time, my wife usually walks in the door around the same time, dinner starts anywhere from 9 to 9:30 and we’re done by 10.

Depending on the day, I’ll watch a TV show (I’m a TiVo guy … sorry media center dudes), whether it’s Battlestar Galatica, Eureka, 60 minutes or Jon Stewart, something to relax the brain.

11:00 pm – 12:30 am – answer emails from China, make sure the home printer is working ... never fails that the wife always seems to break the printer every night ... sorry honey but it’s the truth. Get the home machine building with the latest updated sources and hit the sack…

Like I said, I’m not the typical programmer, so my hours vary depending on what I am focusing my attention on at the current time. I should also point out that when I’m not programming /debugging during the day I’m writing papers or doing research for the group on a variety of issues.

As you can imagine some days are more meetings and some days are more debugging/programming (just a friendly reminder to those PMs out there ... don't even think about scheduling me for more meetings ...). Personally I would love to spend all my days just programming, designing and debugging but one thing everyone knows who develops software professionally, you can't escape the meetings or email unless you ... well I haven't figured out how to escape either of those things during the work week, so if you know could you email me!

trash talkin'

nadyne — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 21:31:00 GMT

October is a pretty fun time to be hanging around the hallways of MacBU SVC. Every October, Microsoft does a company-wide Giving Campaign [1]. In MacBU, we do a few things in conjunction with the Giving Campaign. The highlight of the month is the MacBU bake auction. At the end of the month, we have an auction of various baked goods at the two sites, all made by MacBU employees (well, there might be some assistance from kids, spouses, partners, roommates, and whoever else might be wandering by).

Here in MacBU SVC, the trash talkin' about the auction started last week. The various bakers are beginning to jockey for bids, even though the auction itself isn't until the end of the week. Last Friday, one of our core team developers upped the ante: he decided to do an auction preview. He brought in a chocolate cheesecake and served up slices in our kitchen. Today, Brad Post (that's ExCntx here in this blog) responded by bringing in a few loaves of the sourdough bread that he's contributing to the auction. The Entourage test lead says that he's saving his auction biscotti for this afternoon, and will bring in cheesecake tomorrow afternoon.

So what is the Giving Campaign about, besides trash talkin' and excellent cheesecake? It's about giving back to our communities. Microsoft provides quite a lot of corporate support for this. There are Days of Caring throughout the year, where employees go off on a work day and do something good, such as help out at a Habitat for Humanity site. Microsoft matches cash gifts, up to an annual maximum of $12,000. If an employee chooses to donate time instead of money, Microsoft also matches the contribution: $17 per hour worked for the charity. We have a lot of fun with it, but we never forget the goal.

Every employee gets to choose what they donate to (if they choose to participate, of course). I use this opportunity to donate to two charities: KQED (my local NPR station) and RAINN (the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network – it’s the only nationwide 24-hour hotline for survivors of those crimes). One of the things that I like about working at Microsoft is the widespread corporate support for charitable works. One of the things that I like about working in MacBU is the aforementioned core dev's cheesecake! Getting both of them in one place is just icing on the cake, if you'll forgive the pun.

The Microsoft-wide stuff is pretty fun on its own, of course. The best part of the Microsoft-wide one is the annual auction: Microsoft employees from around the company donate whatever they think might get some bids. One item that seems to be a fixture in the auction is a tour of BillG’s house by Bill himself, and I’d hazard a guess that it’s going to get the highest bid in that auction. I just checked the bidding, and the current high bid is $17,000!