So what's the deal with Mac Messenger?

Several people have now asked about Mac Messenger. More specifically, they’ve given a list of feature requests with A/V at the top. So, why don’t we have it? When will we get it?
Mac Messenger is a product in active development (yes, really!) so I can’t answer either of those two questions directly. I’ve been able to share a lot of MacBU’s back story because that’s all about work done in the past, not about work currently being done or future work in planning. However, for the same reasons that I don’t share feature lists for the next version of Mac Office, I won’t do it for Mac Messenger either.
That said, I can give you all a little bit of insight. Here’s what I’d like you to know: The MacBU is a medium-sized group at Microsoft (at least from my perspective) but compared to either the Win Office team or the various incarnations of the Messenger app on the Windows platform, we’re actually pretty small. The MacBU has a grand total of 52 developers (including leads and managers). A quick query across Win Office shows roughly 550 developers, meaning they are over 10x larger than we are. Yet they own only Office; we own and produce Office, Messenger, RDC and Virtual PC. Because these products are mostly in active development simultaneously, we spread our 50+ developers across these products and thus have relatively small teams. To make our numbers feel even smaller, we’re often doing maintainence work (or even feature work!) on older releases of our software. Did you notice that we have released two service packs for Office 2004, and that both of them had some very large features in them?
So, to the case in point: Messenger. Our Messenger team currently has a total of three developers working on it, plus one open headcount. The average size of the team has remained pretty constant at 4 or 5 developers for the past several years. With such a small team, we have to make tough decisions for each release as to which major features to include, and which ones to cut. For the latest major release (v5) the major feature add was Corporate communications, to tie into the LCS architecture.
Separately, the MacBU has to consider cross-platform compatibility. Just as one of the main selling points for Mac Office is the degree to which it is compatible with Win Office, Mac Messenger must remain compatible with Win Messenger. This means we have to use the same codec as they do, speak the same chat protocol, etc. Perhaps we could add some easy QuickTime video codec and hook up with iChat’s protocol, but that doesn’t help us talk A/V to all the Win Messenger users out there. Porting the Win Messenger codecs and protocols is probably a lot of work (I don’t know how much, or how many people it might take, or how long) but I’m willing to bet it would be a significant investment and large proportion of the available dev time for our small team.
Of course, we could pull other devs off of their other projects and put them onto Messenger, but that has its own problems. The MacBU’s income that it contributes to Microsoft as a whole comes largely from its two main products, Mac Office and Virtual PC. Messenger is given out freely, and any return on that investment comes primarily from the value add it brings to the Office suite and for its compatibility with Win Messenger. We have to seriously weigh the ramifications of the loss of our primary revenue stream. Ok, so that sounds like I’m a corporate shill, but it’s the financial truth of any business, no matter how large or small. If I run a little espresso stand, I’ve got to keep making coffee drinks, no matter how cool it might be to add something like a free valet parking service, right?
My impression (and I may very well be wrong) is that the comments I’ve received about Messenger have been from people wanting to use it for personal use, as opposed to inside a corporate network. As such, I guess that the corporate chat feature is largely useless to you. Since I don’t work on Messenger, I don’t know all the details of why that particular feature won out and others didn’t, but I’m sure the team (devs plus program managers and testers) all had to make some very hard choices. Our choices obviously did not satisfy Matt, priit, or Nik. How does that quote go? “You can please some people some of the time, but you can’t please everybody all of the time,” or something like that.
As for audio and video, believe me, we know how much you want it. We hear about it all the time and we’ve certainly heard the howls of anger coming from the various public forums on places like Ars Technica and MacNN each time we’ve released a version without A/V. Perhaps we’ll get a version with it someday. Perhaps even soon. For now, you’ll just have to wait and see if we surprise you.
I know that’s not the answer you were looking for, but that is the honest truth.
Hey, if you want to help us make a version with A/V and you’ve got the right L33t Mac Skillz, you could always apply for a job in the MacBU.
/me ducks and hides…