secrets and buzz

The Wall Street Journal published an article last week titled At Apple, Secrecy Complicates Life but Maintains Buzz. Here's a quote from the article:

While many tech companies assign internal code names to products, Apple goes a step further. It often gives different departments dissimilar code names for the same product, current and former employees say. If a code name leaks, Apple can more easily track down the department from which the leak originated.

In the interests of being more transparent, I'm going to share a secret with you, my dear readers. Microsoft is one of those tech companies that assign internal code names to products [1]. The code name for our next version of Office:Mac is (drumroll) ... Office 12.

I hope I didn't just kill any of our buzz by revealing that secret.


[1] My favourite code name that was used by MacBU was Taco Cat. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out which product had that for a code name and why. (We don't make that many products, so guesses don't count.)