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a delicate balancing act

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If you ever want to get an idea of the complexity of determining what should go into Office, you can read the blog comments in Mac Mojo. The comments there are a pretty interesting snapshot of the multitude of directions that we're pulled in.

As of this writing, my most recent post there has 30 comments. One person asks, 'Seriously, does anybody really care about anything but Exchange support?' Someone responded, 'Well, I don't care at all about Exchange support, since there isn't an Exchange server anywhere around.' In another line of commentary, someone says, 'I use office daily, and having it be more usable and mac-like is fantastic.' But then someone else says, 'Honestly, I'd love to have the identical program available on both platforms with absolutely no difference between the two.'

Those are just four blog comments plucked out of the comments to one post. I could spend hours finding examples of comments just in the team blog that identify places where we receive directly conflicting feedback. That's just the blog comments. Now add in the research that I do, the research we get from other places in the organisation (product planning, for example), other sources of feedback.

When I interview candidates for program management or user experience positions, I usually throw a question about handling conflicting feedback at them: some users say [this], other users say [that], how do you make a decision? (So now you know something you might hear from me if you were to interview with me!) Answering this question is an important part of what we do here.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    September 18, 2007
    Are you going to add the Mini Toolbar found in the new Word 2007.  This wouldn't be too difficult to add since that its a small, but useful feature. PLEASE INCLUDE THE Mini-Toolbar IN WORD!!!!

  • Anonymous
    September 18, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    September 18, 2007
    I guess a part of the problem is the different between corporate and home use. We have Office 2004 on a Mac mini in our office at work, and I have it on my iBook at home. On my iBook, the fact that it natively handles the Office formats is fantastic. The few differences don't matter too much to me, and I don't even use Entourage as my email is on Mail.app. At work, however, the differences are slightly more pronounced. And the fact that Entourage is not 100% Exchange-compatible causes problems when I need to use the Mac. Especially when my Windows laptop has problems, and I need to look up a Note or a Task. I also think that part of it is that a lot of people use Office for Mac to be compatible with Windows colleagues or offices, but there are some who simple use it because they prefer it from the alternatives. The former group want something WinOffice compatible, yet plays nice with Mac. The latter might contain people who just want the best Mac office client going. As someone who works in a Windows office, and wishes to use the office Mac more often, I have to admit being in the "full feature parity" camp. Looking/acting identical isn't so much of a concern, but it really needs to do the same job. But I guess it's just one of those situations where it's hard to please everybody, otherwise you'd be needing to release dozens of versions of the same product.

  • Anonymous
    September 18, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    September 19, 2007
    Read all the comments and think about them. Then throw them away and build what your instinct tells you to build. The reading and thinking will give you insight. The throwing away will release you from the conflicting detail.

  • Anonymous
    September 19, 2007
    Parity efforts should start with the renaming of Entourage to Outlook 2008:mac The current name scares the s@@t out of mediocre IT camps.

  • Anonymous
    September 19, 2007
    James - The comments to our team blog is that it's not the only source of input to us.  Blog readers tend to be rather savvy and much more likely to be IT folks, which means that the comments there are heavily skewed.  Soccer moms don't tend to be tech blog readers. :)   More importantly, adding features isn't just about tallying up votes.  That's how you end up with bloatware instead of good software.  To really deliver a great product, we have to be able to figure out what users need, which isn't always what they say that they need.  Meeting unarticlated needs is one of the differences between good software and great software.