Predicting the future. Or not.

MacPredict caught my post on our Xcode status, and is asking people to predict when Microsoft will ship a Universal Binary of Mac Office. So far, I see that the ‘consensus’ is January of 2007. Heh.
I’m not going to drop any hints about when we’ll ship, but I do want to point out two things.
1) MacPredict says “it sounds like they haven’t even got it compiling in xCode yet.” That’s not really true. We do have Office building in Xcode; we’re just not 100% done. The vast majority of MacBU devs are using Xcode on a daily basis for the vast majority of their work. We just have a few tricky issues left to work out around a number of core bits of code.
2) The fact that Office builds under Xcode not a very good predictor of when we’ll ship. We’re doing a heck of a lot more in this release than just ‘making it Universal.’ Remember, we were already more than a year into the product development cycle when Steve & Co. announced the Intel switch, with lots of planning done well before Office 2004 shipped.
However, the world just wouldn’t be right without rampant speculation and rumors, so please, go ahead and give it your best guess. Predict away, and we’ll see where we end up.
Full disclosure: I ‘predicted’ June 30, 2006. It’d be nice if we hit this internally… 🙂