Last week shimmeringjemmy made a post about how we are planning to transition aiden_freeman from going down for the night in our bed to going down in his own.
She commented about how I’d be taking a week off. The original version of her post (which was up for about 10 minutes) went on to explain that I was taking a week off because my product was shipping. I asked her to edit that sentence because we really hadn’t actually shipped anything.
The team I’ve been on has been working on Microsoft Office for Mac (the 12th version, known as Office 2008) for about 4 years. The past 6-9 months have been very grueling as we hammered thru final features and a lot of bugs. In the past year I personally have gotten up close and personal with one of the 4 major applications to a degree I’d ever have believed before taking the job.
As of this morning, the word went out to the public. We have released the product to our manufacturers. This means the final data has been signed off and we have been able to burn the same data to more than one disc internally. Getting to RTM isn’t the longest phase by far but it is assuring that we can deliver the best version of the software that we have spent months/years getting to.
By (I Guess) company tradition a hand crank siren was brought into our RTM gathering yesterday afternoon. Several members of the team took turn sounding out (loudly) that “The data has left the building”
I hope that my Mac using friends and colleagues (and the people I don’t know) get as much out of using this new version, as I got out of developing and learning it. Without being accused of “Drinking the water”… Office 2008 for Mac really is an amazing product.