Microsoft's Mac unit gets new boss

Microsoft said Friday that it is changing the leadership of its Macintosh Business Unit, the group responsible for Office for Mac.

Eric Wilfrid, a product unit manager in the division, will succeed Craig Eisler, who is moving to a role elsewhere in Robbie Bach's entertainment and devices unit. In an interview, Wilfrid declined to say what exactly his former boss will be up to or even to whom Eisler will report.

Eisler took over in June 2007 when then MacBU head Roz Ho moved to a secretive mobile job within the entertainment unit.

Wilfrid said that Office for Mac remains the group's primary effort and will continue to be its "center of gravity," although the unit also has a role in helping other Microsoft units evaluate their Mac plans. For example, the Live Mesh group this week released a Mac version of its service.

Wilfrid said the Mac unit currently has 230 employees, which he said was a lot bigger than the group was even as recently as when it shipped Office 2008 for Mac.

Wilfrid wouldn't say whether the staffing up would lead the unit to expand its products beyond the Mac versions of Office and Messenger. "We're always looking at the possibilities," he said. "There aren't any details that we are ready to share at this time."

Wilfrid, a 14 year Microsoft veteran, most recently had led all MacBU engineering efforts. He got his start writing code for PowerPoint and for most of his time has been based in Mountain View, Calif. He moved to Redmond a couple of months ago.

[Mr. Dee]

The only reason I think of for the staff growth is the engineering talent needed to help port Visual Basic scripting support for Office for Mac on Intel. The team dropped support for it in Office 2008 because they considered it to be a huge under taking that would hold back the release of the product. The Office for Mac Team announced a few months back that the next release would bring it back.

[ittesi259]

Its be nice to get Viso or Project ported to Mac....I hate having to Bootcamp back and forth.

[Galaxy5]

Craig probably committed the sin of believing that he had the support of management in making "The best office suite for Mac".

Ballmer and what's-his-face-the-Windows-guy made comments last month that the Mac version of Office was sub-par to the PC version, which is exactly the opposite of what the Mac Business Unit has been telling Mac users for several years now.

[Galaxy5]

":Its be nice to get Viso or Project ported to Mac"

Ha! Keep dreaming. Microsoft makes boatloads of money every time they sell to one of us Mac users in the Enterprise. Between extra copies of Windows for BootCamp and/or having a spare PC for Project/Acess/Visio, they are raking in the dough from Mac users.

[lantzn]

You might look into Crossover for Mac to run Visio. You don't need to install Windows to run Windows apps which is a plus.

http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxmac/
Visio compatibility
http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/name/?letter=v;

[Mr. Dee]

The only way I see Project, Visio, OneNote and Access getting ported to the Mac is through VMWare Fusion Unity or Parallels Coherence mode. Of course, Microsoft is not doing to obviously keep the relevance of Windows and Office for Windows going. I don't even think the next version of Office for Mac will feature better support for Entourage with Exchange server.