Great Expectations

(Sorry, Charles.)

Hiya folks!  I'm Erik Schwiebert, one of the development leads here in the MacBU.  I wanted to jump in here quickly to set some expectations based on some of the comments I've seen here about our team blog.

A number of people have said that the content they really want is stuff like "When will MacBU release a universal binary of Office?" or "Where's feature X and why don't you have it NOW?"  These are great questions and we always appreciate the feedback, but I think you are unlikely to see answers to them here.  Feature announcements (both new items and removals, such as Windows Office 2007 file format support and the removal of Visual Basic) will generally always come out first as a true press release or official statement.  Once things have been formally announced, we are able to discuss them both here and on our personal blogs.

So, if that's the case, then why are we here?  Well, as Chris noted in our inaugural post, "We are developers, testers, user assistance managers, product managers, usability engineers, product marketers and executives who offer different perspectives but share the same passion for Office and the Mac. We hope this blog provides you with a deeper insight into our work and who we are, and we’re very excited to be out here talking to you!"  At the risk of committing a faux pas by linking to myself twice within one post, I personally want to show you that we really are human.  Whether you actually trust us or not (hopefully you do), I believe we're here simply to show you who we are, what we do, and why we like it.

I think you'll find over time that this blog really is not about marketing fluff.  Brad's post on debugging through VPC gave me an idea for my first real post with content, and neither of us is likely to write an official press release any time soon.  So, stay tuned for the harrowing tale of the newbie developer and the heisenbug! (Sometimes I kid myself that it might have been worthy of Kon and Bal...)