Mac developers who made the news

The folks over at Macworld have an article about Mac developers who made the news in 2008. We get a shout-out in there, given that we kicked the Mac year off with our release.

Working on software is weird. To the rest of the world, Office 2008 is the latest-and-greatest. To me, it's not. I've been working on our next releases since well before Office 2008 hit store shelves. There's plenty of people who haven't upgraded to Office 2008 yet (we had a stellar year for sales, but that doesn't mean that the whole world upgraded in January 2008), whereas I started using Office 2008 more than a year before it launched, and I switched over to using [redacted] a couple of months after the release of Office 2008.

It's the whole dogfood culture: I don't want anyone outside of MacBU to use it until it's been thoroughly tested, so I "eat my own dogfood" and use it first. This trips me up sometimes -- before answering a question about Office 2008, I have to check to make sure that it's accurate for that version instead of for what I'm currently using. If someone asks me a question about Office 2004, I have to point them to another resource (or look through the Office 2004 help) 'cause that feels like ancient history to me.

Okay, back to working on my Macworld presentation. If you're coming to San Francisco, track me down in the hallway or in our booth to say hi!