Wait, wait, I'm here

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?