It’s a big Friday in MacBU as we are celebrating the “Release to Manufacturing” of Office for Mac 2011. This means we’ve signed off on final testing and the product is officially getting sent on its way to production and to customers. We’ll be cranking the Microsoft ship siren and celebrating in all of our team locations (Redmond, Microsoft Silicon Valley, Beijing, Dublin and Tokyo), raising a glass to Office 2011!

As you can likely guess, I’m pretty glad to be posting this news. We started two and a half years ago with some big goals to deliver major improvements customers have requested as well as new stuff we were dreaming up, and to release faster than we had before. We also made a big commitment to invest heavily in “the basics” – fundamentals of software quality including design polish and finish, consistency and usability, and particularly performance and responsiveness, and to re-engineer our internal development processes around those goals. And we’re releasing the bits on the exact day we planned.

It takes every single person on the team to make this happen, and I’d like to take this opportunity to congratulate and thank everyone on the MacBU product team for their commitment to excellence and going above and beyond to get to done on Office 2011. I’d also like to thank our many partners around the world including MVPs, beta testers and our friends at Apple. Finally, a very sincere special thanks to all of our families and friends for their support during this final push to shipping.

via MacTopia

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