Bad timing

The comments made against my last post on trusting MacBU mostly relate to the oddly named product ‘Windows Media Player for Mac’. Several people ask why its quality is so poor, and why the MacBU hasn’t done anything to fix it.
Well, I can’t really answer the first question, but the answer to the second question is easy: WMP-Mac is not and never was a product owned or produced by the MacBU. WMP-Mac was actually ported to the Mac by a small group of folks either in or closely linked to the main WMP-Win team (which, depending on your perspective, may be the answer to the first question.)
I got to thinking about this today as I wandered around the house with my daughter. No team at Microsoft really spends any effort telling customers what products it owns or doesn’t own. For the most part, that’s because it is relatively obvious — the Xbox team owns, umm, the Xbox, right? Yet the MacBU is in a little bit of a different spot. Because Microsoft as a whole makes very few Mac products, the average consumer might reasonably expect that the ‘Macintosh’ Business Unit at Microsoft would make all Mac products at Microsoft. Except that isn’t true…
The MacBU makes Mac Office, Mac Messenger, the Mac version of Remote Desktop Connection, and Virtual PC for Mac. We do not make and never have made WMP-Mac, any Mac hardware or drivers, the Windows SFM client, or Mac Outlook 2001. Yet we’ve shipped WMP-Mac on our Office CDs and in the past we’ve publicly referred people to Mac Outlook 2001 as an Exchange solution, so that confuses the issue.
One way this confusion over product ownership really adversely affected our trustablility was over a couple of press releases. Look at these:

• Microsoft Commits to New Versions of Office for Mac
• Windows Media Components for QuickTime, by Flip4Mac

Look closely. See the dates? Both PRs were released on January 10! My understanding, which may be wrong, is that neither the WMP-Mac team and Telestream nor the MacBU knew about the other pending press release and agreement. Thus, on January 10, it looked like Microsoft-the-uber-company was simultaneously saying “Hey, look, more Mac software” on one side, and “Hey, look, less Mac software” on the other. That’s essentially what this article claimed.
There was so much wrong with that article it was almost comical. Yet, from a trustworthy perspective it really burned us. What really got me was that the author was in such a rush to post “OMG Microsoft is abandoning the Mac” that they didn’t wait to actually talk to anyone at MacBU! Sure, there’s a tag at the bottom saying “Microsoft didn’t comment,” but hey, we were all busy at MacWorld explaning just what our new 5-year commitment meant. Better yet was the unnamed “sources” saying that “key developers in the MacBU” had been assigned elsewhere. Folks, that doesn’t happen here. Employees have open careers at Microsoft; its up to the employee to decide if there’s a job somewhere else at Microsoft to which they’d like to switch. As a matter of fact, we’ve had several devs from other non-Mac groups move into the MacBU!
Anyway, where I was going with all this is that as unnecessary as it may seem to us internally, maybe it would make some sense for us to more visibly call out MacBU products as ‘Made by MacBU”… I dunno — I’m most definately not in marketing or public relations and I’m not any sort of upper-level manager, so I don’t have the experience to make any such recomendation.
In any case, now you know what products the MacBU is responsible for. Feel free to praise or criticise those as you wish, but please don’t hold us accountable for that other product over there. 🙂