Congratulations Eric, looking forward to seeing the fruits of your labours. But surely Word 4.0 was the best version, so why not upgrade!?

Hi Eric,
Just wanted to say welcome and wish you the best of luck with your new position (and environment).
Bob

Good to see someone committed (not that predecessors weren't) to the future of the MacBU. Congrats on the promotion! Hope you have a great time and lots of years at the MacBU making things even better.

[Add obligatory Please Make Entourage more Exchange compatible comment here.]

Good luck and don't take the flack seriously. There's lots of us who use Office for Mac and wouldn't use any alternative no matter what the price or lack thereof!

Eric

Sounds like you've earned your spot, Eric! Welcome to the Seattle area!

I had the same SE/30 with me through college. It's a trip to see how fast it can boot and run everything.

I sure hope you are more of a presence here than your predecessor, who came in with a bang and posted five more times in his 16 month career. I left him one comment that was a bit pointed and another explaining myself more in-depth. I think if you read those and the other comments in those posts you'll get a good idea of the kind of fervent supporters you have. We'll hold you accountable for things and we'll love your accomplishments.

You have a huge opportunity here - do some good!

Congratulations again

Eric, I am sure that you have read some of the messages from frustrated excel users about the many issues with excel...it crashes often and it is riddled with bugs...it is also incredibly slow compared to the PC version. I am at the point of having to invest in working in Spot Light or something else...excel just cant seem to do what the PC version could. Why is this happening? I am an avid excel fan...but I have work to do and excel 2008 for mac keeps crashing and throwing up beach balls....help!!!!!!!!!!!

I just bought Office 2008, to use on my Mac which I will be soon using at work in place of a Windows laptop. Coming from Office 2007, 2008 is pretty good and fairly similar - Word and Excel are fine - but Entourage has some issues.
Let's face it, a lot of people want (need) Entourage to be Outlook for the Mac. Outlook 2007 is actually pretty good. But there are some little things in Entourage that really annoy. HTML support for one. Why can I not add proper hyperlinks in messages, or importantly, signature blocks? I mean hyperlinks where the displayed text is different to the URL it links to. Whether we like it or not, many organisations require a standard signature block with hyperlinks. Currently, I can't satisfy this requirement with Entourage. I know there are security issues, but let the user decide, don't just not allow it at all! Entourage does deserve a commendation for ultra quick HTML rendering however - although I believe that's mostly attributable to WebKit, not Microsoft.
Lastly, there's still some old-Mac OS X style stuff in Office 2008 that looks rather out of place with Leopard in 2008. Those rounded Aqua 1.0 rectangular buttons (e.g. the "Click here to add recipients" To/CC button when composing a message) just don't fit.
Please take the time to focus on the little things with Office for Mac - it is a good product that could be great. And it's not like you're not selling enough to justify the investment
Regards,
Chris Carruthers.

It's clearly hopeless.... After all, I think Steve Ballmer put it best in his recent PC Magazine interview.... "You know, anyway—can you find the applications you want on the Mac? Well, you don't really get full Microsoft Office."

If Steve Ballmer himself is stating this, and obviously directing things to the goal, then there is little hope that the Mac BU can do anything about it. I'd wager that the feature inequity that keeps getting larger and larger is directed from the top down.

Looking for some positive changes to the Microsoft apps for Apple. Btw, I think Microsoft makes excellent apps. I think Apple should recognize the mutual dependency and be less arrogant about their mac vs PC ads.
Best of luck,
K

MS Products (particularly Office) play an essential part of Mac application landscape. I hope you bring energy and vision to the role and provide us Mac users with the quality experience we crave. I'd really really like to see feature parity and consistency between Windows and Mac versions of products (particularly Office and Messenger). As someone who NEEDS to use both windows and macs, the discrepancies between the two platforms is really frustrating. As a really small example of this (though there are many) try dragging the slide thumbnails around in Pane/Normal view on a Mac - oh wait... it doesn't let you do that!

Again, my warmest wishes to you and best of luck the the new post!

Our Windows shop is about to move to Office 2007. Oh, man, yuck! They took away common sense usability and ease of use. What used to be 1 click is now 2 or 3. I say this as a signpost for you and your team to avoid. Stay true to Mac interface and usability guidelines (even as Apple has strayed a bit). Your good choices will be the differentiator that keeps Mac Office relevant.

I'm hoping that you take the Macintosh development team in a new direction -- preferably away from Steve Ballmer's recent comments about Mac users not getting "the full version" of Office. Why would he say something like that? Anyhow, congrats and welcome!

Congrats on your newest position of leadership at the MacBU. I am eager to see what directions you'll take your division. My short list revolves around the iPhone/touch. Can there be a mini-Office for iPhone included with next update of Office for Mac or for a small price through App Store?

Congratulations.

Firstly, welcome. I hope that you'll be able to work closely with customers here to further better your products for Mac. And I'd like to start with one small suggestion:

Without going in to detail, I am one of many waiting to hear about a proper, complete Windows Live Messenger for Mac. Something that would allow for A/V, nudges, auto re-connecting, the ability to edit contact information from Messenger, and much, much more.

But I'll save you the time of saying what a million people have said before me. You know we want this, we know we might never get it. Such is life.

BUT

I think it would make a lot more people if you could better communicate with waiting customers. More frequent updates, less cryptic comments, and responses to the questions we post in your blogs. I don't care for the posts that promise the same thing as last time, but offer no news. I really, really feel strongly that you guys need to better communicate with us and respond to us when we have concerns or questions.

And, again, I think you guys NEED to stop with the cryptic comments. There's no point posting just to say that you're working hard and have big plans. We want realistic dates, proposed features, and constant communication.

Thank-you, and I hope you'll have a blast working at the BU!

Please get us MSN Messenger with video and audio support

Welcome and good luck!

To be honest, I just don't get a good feeling using any part of Office 2008, it just feels too clunky. As software goes it doesn't 'feel good' to use.. don't know if that makes sense.

I hope some though will go into introducing some form and elegance into the next version of Office.. something Apple is quite good at (in most cases). Also, specialised Mac features such as Publishing view should be given a lower priority than feature parity with the Windows versions and stability.

I assume you guys are behaviour/test driven and use continuous integration?

Cheers.

It's clear from your comments that we all share a passion for Office for Mac. With new leadership, my team's mission remains consistent: bring Microsoft productivity to the Mac. Your feedback is extremely important to our development process, and we're listening closely as we update Office 2008 and engineer Office for the future. Expect to see the team continue to focus on reliable cross platform compatibility with Windows Office applications. We'll also build on our productivity experience by connecting to servers and services. And as always, we are passionate about experience: Mac experience and your experience every day when you choose to use Office. There are exciting possibilities and we look forward to sharing product updates at Macworld 2009 and beyond. Thank you again!

I understand VBA macros will be return to the next version of Office. I just wanted to reinforce the need for this as I really have no energy to rewrite my macros and Office 2004 works just fine.

To put my Mac stake in the sand, your SE sounds fine but I started with a Mac Plus and lived the through the early versions of Word 3.0 with its self-corrupting file features. So I've been around for a while. I think I started with Excel 1 and have regularly upgraded as new versions were created through Office 2004. No VBA macros, no Office 2008. Good to hear it will appear again. Or was that just a rumour?

Cheers.

VBA is no rumor- it's real and really coming back in the next Office. Stay tuned...

Just wanted to echo the congratulations on the promotion, but really wanted to say that I hope you will put a bit of oomph into the MacBU and deal with some pretty basic irritants that exist on core applications.

I feel as though Microsoft's Mac customers are always treated as the "others," don't get me wrong, I like several of your products...but it's completely unbelievable and unacceptable that Messenger STILL doesn't support Mac-to-Windows video and audio chatting for regular home users. Come on!

Can this be made a priority, please? After all, there's little incentive for me to support the MacBU if Microsoft can't even be bothered to get around to fixing a basic issue that stops Mac and Windows users from video or audio chatting with one another in the era of social media.

Sorry to be such a grump, but the sorry state of Messenger for Mac has been a huge personal gripe for me for many years. I'm hoping that the MacBU's new management will help fix this issue and others...so that Microsoft can start to regain some street cred in the Mac community.

Cheers.