Beyond Binary

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.

Finally.

Microsoft on Tuesday released the file format converters that allow Office 2004 for Mac to read the Open XML file formats that were introduced in Office 2007 for Windows. The converters were originally due to be available close to the launch of Office 2007, but have been delayed several times.

The delays meant that Office 2008, which supports the new formats, actually hit the market before the converters. Of course, since Microsoft makes money off new versions of Office and not off making the older product more compatible, perhaps that was part of the plan.

In any case, the converters are now available for download, along with some other updates for both Office 2004 and Office 2008.

One of the factors in the long wait for the converters, Microsoft said, was the fact that its team was hard at work on Office 2008. Perhaps a new hiring spree means that in the future Microsoft can offer both compatibility for older versions and work on new products at the same time.

Microsoft is hoping that better Windows products and marketing will eventually stem the market share gains that Apple has been making. In the meantime, the company is trying to make the best of things.

The software maker is growing its Mac Business Unit (MacBU), which just had another record year.

"The Mac BU at Microsoft is growing--we're launching our biggest hiring initiative since the inception of MacBU 11 years ago," general manager Craig Eisler said in a blog posting. "We are hard at work planning for products beyond Office 2008, and we are growing our team to help turn our vision into reality."

The posting didn't say just how many people Microsoft is looking to hire or just what some of its new products might be (aside from a future version of Office). Eisler did note the general areas in which Microsoft is hiring as well as offer a Top 10 list of reasons to join his group. I'll let those who are interested read his blog for that.

"We're hiring for multiple roles (Program Managers, Developers, Testers, User Experience, and Marketing) in Redmond and Silicon Valley," Eisler wrote.

While Apple's market share gains are cause for consternation for many in Redmond, one unit is clearly benefiting.

Microsoft's Mac unit is set to disclose on Tuesday that copies of the new Office for Mac 2008 are flying off the shelves at three times the rate of its predecessor. The company wouldn't disclose sales numbers, but said the sales are the highest in the 19-year history of the unit. That continues a trend that has been going on for some time.

Senior marketing manager Amanda Lefebvre declined to give all of the credit to Apple, but said of the increased number of Macs, "Of course that's one of the components that is helping us."

The company also said it was ready with the first "service pack" update for Mac Office 2008, adding things like reliability and performance tweaks, as well as some changes aimed at boosting security. The update will be available Tuesday for download and will also be pushed out through Microsoft's AutoUpdate system, Lefebvre said.

Finally, the company announced that, for the next full release of Office for Mac, it is bringing back support for Visual Basic scripts. That feature was in Office 2004 but was pulled in the current version as Microsoft worked to add support for Intel processors and new file formats.

Lefebvre wouldn't say what any of the other features planned for the next Mac Office will be, but said the company is looking to get back on a cycle that would have it releasing new products every two to three years. (Office for Mac 2008 took four years.)

For those still using the last release of Office, Lefebvre said that, after several delays, Microsoft is on track to release by the end of June the converters that let that product work with the XML file formats that are part of Office 2007 for Windows and Office 2008 for Mac.

"We're on track for that," she said. "We're happy to be getting those off our plate and developing for the future."