Windows 7 Blog

Windows 7 now has a blog hosted by two senior engineers: Engineering Windows 7

Interesting in that Microsoft appears to be trying to be more open about the development process and is soliciting user input.

I see. In what direction they are trying to go. Guided by the end users rather then force them to use what ever they come up with. Interesting in did! Wondering whats the idea behind it? Well its Microsoft.

ooohhhhh, i think i’ll ask them to build in some out-of-the-box
features like “security as good as BSD” or “range of options as large
as KDE”, or “use of standard Java like SUSE”, or etc

see how they deal with that kinda input… >:)


DenverD (Linux Counter 282315) via NNTP, Thunderbird 2.0.0.14, KDE
3.5.7, SUSE Linux 10.3, 2.6.22.18-0.2-default #1 SMP i686 athlon

Reading the comments to their second post is quite interesting. There are as one might expect a few posts by fanatics but there is also some interesting discussion about the pros and cons of various OS choices and what one OS might learn from the others. Could be an interesting window (no pun intended) into the development process. What strikes me from their most recent post is the complexity of the development process. There appears to be a core engineering team and then 25 feature teams of about 40 developers each.

Some have said that the Windows team is just too big and that it has reached a size that causes engineering problems. At the same time, I might point out that just looking at the comments there is a pretty significant demand for a broad set of features and changes to Windows. It takes a set of people to build Windows and it is a big project. The way that I look at this is that our job is to have the Windows team be the right size—that sounds cliché but I mean by that is that the team is neither too large nor too small, but is effectively managed so that the work of the team reflects the size of the team and you see the project as having the benefits we articulate. I’m reminded of a scene from Amadeus where the Emperor suggests that the Marriage of Figaro contains “too many notes” to which Mozart proclaims “there are just as many notes, Majesty, as are required, neither more nor less.” Upon the Emperor suggesting that Mozart remove a few notes, Mozart simply asks “which few did you have in mind?” Of course the people on the team represent the way we get feature requests implemented and develop end to end scenarios, so the challenge is to have the right team and the right structure to maximize the ability to get those done—neither too many nor too few.

Interesting in they that the appear not to have gotten this right on Vista and this blog appears part of an attempt to try and do a better job on the next release.

> Windows 7 now has a blog hosted by two senior engineers: ‘Engineering
> Windows 7’ (http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/)
>
> Interesting in that Microsoft appears to be trying to be more open
> about the development process and is soliciting user input.

Viral marketing…nothing to do with openess.