Geoff here - I am a product unit manager at the MacBU, and lead for the design and engineering of Office for Mac. Here are a few thoughts on the year in review.

First, Macworld 2008 was a great place to kick the year off with a big launch, as we released Office 2008 after an intensive four year development cycle, including migrating our product line to Universal applications and building in support for the Open XML file formats. New award-winning eco-friendly packaging in hand, we got to sit down with ever-ebullient Macworld attendees, geeks, colleagues and press to talk about the newly released suite. A great reminder of the diversity out there with Mac users, all nationalities and all ages – I particularly remember our interview with the Teen Press of my former hometown’s Santa Barbara Middle School (SBMS Teen Press on Macworld.) There was A Day at the Office and a little help celebrating the metacognitive Macness of it all from none other than the legendary Devo.

Office 2008 included many new painstakingly crafted features, more than are easy to list – a year after launch a few that I’m still commonly pointing out to people because I know they’ll get hooked on them are Publishing Layout View, SmartArt, and Ledger Sheets.

Since Office 2008 launched in January, we’ve been highly focused on developing and releasing continuous updates, with a focus on monitoring and improving the stability and performance of the product. Just in our Office 12.1.2 update for example, Word’s launch time improved by as much as 30% and Excel’s calculation performance by as much as 50% (some calc-heavy test cases saw even more improvement – the result of floating point math optimizations.)

We’ve also kept listening to customer feedback and worked to deliver requested updates. We re-introduced support for EndNote and Solver. In May we released our major service pack (SP1) and announced our plans to fully return Visual Basic for Applications (on which EndNote and Solver previously relied) to Mac Office in our next major release.

We’re now well into development of that next major release. We passed our milestone 2 checkpoint in November. The all hands mentioned by Eric included live demos of basic VB scripts running Intel-native in a test harness (no, not near ready for release) along with a long queue of other demos from all three development sites, some of which we’ll be sharing sooner rather than later.

The engineering team has grown, with great veterans in key roles and some great new hires. Earlier in the year as we geared up for new development to start in earnest, we instituted some significant changes to our development practices, with a stronger focus on feature crews (tight coordination of developers, testers and program managers to drive each feature to shipping quality early) and stepping up our approach in such areas as architectural reviews and user experience focus. We’re now moving ahead pretty smoothly with the new system in place and we’re generally focused on execution, meaning getting the new product built, with efficiency and high upfront quality (that is, when we’re not focused on creativity.)

Some deeper investments in the Mac Office codebase are underway, including more aggressive conversion to Cocoa, building on the great Carbon-Cocoa interop foundations that are now in place in Office 2008 and Leopard as well as some of the progress we’ve made in better factoring model and view under the hood. On the compatibility front, expanded portions of Word and Exel core code have been fully re-ported – some promising progress in a relatively short time period.

Meanwhile we still have many crews working on straight up new features and functionality, either underway or already exited (and on stage for the aforementioned demos.) We really look forward to sharing more of our new work with you in the coming year.

Please keep the feedback coming, and let us know if there are topics you’d like us to address here at Mac Mojo in 2009. If you’re in the city, stop by the booth or the lounge at Macworld and say hello (or… whatever you have in mind) – we’ll see you there.

Best wishes on the new year and happy holidays to you and yours,
Geoff