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Teching It Easy: Windows Vista & 7The stuff that really matters to me.
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August 20 Windows Development - does size matter? There has been a lot of discussion this week stemming from the article over at the E7 blog about the size of the Windows 7 development team. Persons are saying, Windows 7's human resources are just too big and hard to manage. Microsoft (Steven Sinofsky) response to that is, its the scope of the project that determines how many persons are allocated to developing the product. The Windows Team is divided into 23 + Development Teams. Some of the main feature teams for Windows 7 include (alphabetically):
Microsoft Distinguished Engineer and Windows Server Architect Mark Lucovsky told me. "Now there are 5000 member of the Windows team, plus an additional 5000 contributing partners, generating over 50 million lines of code for Windows Server 2003. It's the biggest software engineering task ever attempted. There are no other software projects like this." Thats 10,000 developers depending on how you look at it. Considering that Windows 7 consist of both client and server and the approximation of Developers is around 2,500 it doesn't spectacularly amazing about the size of the Development Team in this release. For Windows 2000, Microsoft noted a higher amount of developers worked on the project than is now allocated to Windows 7, if todays estimates are correct: "Microsoft has invested more than $1 billion in the development of Windows 2000, and more than 5,000 employees worked on the new platform, Gates said". Microsoft Presspass: Windows 2000 Now Broadly Available So, the enthusiast communities astonishment is a bit strange in my opinion, a project like Windows as Mark Lucovsky said is huge, taking into account the audience and segments of the market. Windows is not the Windows of 90's or early 2000's, this project that has changed dramatically over the years and continues to grow in features and yes, size. E7 Blog: Maginitude of the Windows 7 Release From Engineering Windows 7 Steven Sinofsky blogger and head honcho of the Windows 7 Project took the time out today to discuss Windows 7's significance in terms of being a major upgrade or minor release, a huge topic in the blogs this week. Here is a snippet of what he had to say: Quote: When we started planning the release, the first thing some might think we have to decide is if Windows 7 (client) would be a “major release” or not. I put that in quotes because it turns out this isn’t really something you decide nor is it something with a single answer. The magnitude of a release is as much about your perspective on the features as it is about the features themselves. One could even ask if being declared a major release is a compliment or not. As engineers planning a product we decide up front the percentage of our development team will that work on the release and the extent of our schedule—with the result in hand customers each decide for themselves if the release is “major”, though of course we like to have an opinion. On the server blog we talked about the schedule and we shared our opinion of the scale of the releases of Windows 7 client and server. Our goal is about building an awesome release of Windows 7. Across all customers, there is always a view that a major release is one that has features that are really the ones for me. A minor release is one that doesn’t have anything for me. It should then be pretty easy to plan a major release—just make sure it exactly the right features for everyone (and given the focus on performance, it can’t have any extra features, even if other people want them)! As engineers we all know such a design process is really impossible, especially because more often than not any two customers can be found to want exactly opposite features. In fact as I type this I received sequential emails one saying “[N]obody cares about touch screen nonsense” and the other saying “[Win7 needs] more advanced/robust ‘touch’ features”. When you just get unstructured and unsolicited input you see these opposites quite a bit. I’m sure folks are noticing this on the blog comments as well. Read the entire article here Steve went on to discuss the different categories of users the release of a product tends to target, Consumers, IT Professionals and Developers. My understanding and interpretation about this release of Windows is that major or minor is really in the eye of the beholder. But I wish the E7 Blog could have given a clearer understanding of the significance of this release. For instance, is it an upgrade that all Windows Vista users upgrade to or just Windows XP users? Right now, the only major feature we have become aware of in Windows 7 is Multi-Touch and to be honest, its cool, but not a must have for me in particular I will save final thoughts until I have experienced it. Lets stay tuned in. All About Microsoft: You say major; I say minor - Windows 7From All About Microsoft Mary Jo has been investing Microsoft's recent decision to call Windows Server 7, Windows Server 2008 R2. This to many is indicating it as a minor release and is also reflecting on the client version of Windows 7 as a minor release. Here is a quote: Over the past couple of years, both the Windows client and Windows server teams have been structuring their releases to alternate between major and minor ones. (On the server side, the Softies have been rolling out a major
release followed by a minor update (known as Release 2, or R2) every
two years. On the client side, the timing has been off, but the major/minor cadence has been pretty similar.)Starting with Windows 7, however, that logic and naming structure
that Microsoft has worked to establish for Windows seems to breaking
down.
Is Windows 7 really just version 6.1?Its Official - Windows Server 7 to be a Minor ReleasePC World: Microsoft Sends Up Trial Balloons for Windows 7From PC World Quote: "Windows Vista hasn't fared so well since its debut. Its generally low reputation among customers has led one Forrester analyst to dub Microsoft's latest OS "the New Coke of tech," while some studies have suggested that nearly a third of customers who buy a PC with Vista pre-installed may actually be downgrading those machines to XP.
Still
other customers seem to wish the whole thing will just go away. They
don't want to hear about Vista at all -- they'd rather hear about
Windows 7, the upcoming OS from Microsoft that will be Vista's
successor. And given the dismal consumer reaction to its latest attempts to market Vista, Microsoft seems willing to oblige." This conclusion that Vista is not great or better comes from a lack in understanding and not using the OS enough to really see the obvious benefits out of the box. My brother upgraded to Windows XP in summer of 2002, loved it, you could say he is an earlier adopter and continued using the OS on various machines, including a Dell Inspiron he purchased in June of 2006 (XP Home). My brother jumped on the early Windows Vista adopter bandwagon in January of 2007. He loved it! Yes, the things that 'wowed' him was Vista's visual appeal, it looks darn great. And PC World would be surprised, a lot of people love the richness, the transparency and realness of the OS. AERO is a bold, serious yet inviting look and many people I ask, new to Vista, previous XP or 2000 users, novices, lab techs, love Vista. A lot of negativity about Vista has been intensified by a number of things. Things that we have been acquainted with from previous versions of Windows or any other platform...device drivers and application compatibility. It just was not there for many in early 2007, but it has improved tremendously and has reached the same level as XP or better. You would be hard pressed to find most modern hardware released in the last 2 to 3 years incompatible with the OS, not to mention applications that are probably in their second to third generation of full compatibility with Vista. XP's reception faced many compatibility and hardware issues, I remember some clearly, like Roxio and printer and scanner hardware not being supported. But they eventually were, Roxio did update version 5 to support XP and the problems died. But because XP was released in a time where the Internet, blogging and the spotlight was not on Microsoft and Windows in a scrutinizing way like it is today. In addition to Microsoft's transparency and openness during the Longhorn project, it set a tone and perception in addition to things that happened during the project like reset and drop of features. Those are the irrelevant things that are still etched in the minds of many who covered the OS during its development. Vista in its current form is well accepted, but some lingerings still remained and being revived and utilized by people who have never used Vista, don't use Windows and is being articulated in a way to make Windows out into a platform that is not desirable, these include the voice of Open Source, small resurgence of Apple, Justin Long vs PC and many other insignificant events in the past few years. But it still does not hide the fact that people are accepting of Vista's improvements, whether its developer wise, business or consumer wise. Search, collaboration, ease of setup, security, Backup, organization, true hardware and application support, clean interface and just the plain likability of the OS, people see it and are proving it everyday with the millions of licenses that come pre-installed on new PC's or deployed. Talking about "Windows 7" appears in WSUSFrom Living in Athens via All About Microsoft Just saw this interesting screenshot of Windows 7 support in the WSUS list on Living in Athens. Is this a sign that the first Developer Previews or BETA's of Windows 7 are imminent? Quote "Windows 7" appears in WSUS August 19 Ed Botts Early Windows 7 Hopes From Ed Bott's Microsoft Report Quote: I thought it might be interesting to arrange the feature teams into groups and discuss what I believe the real challenges of each group are. It’s important to remember that this development team is working on business, consumer, and server products, all of which will be built on the Windows 7 code base. THE GUTS Feature teams: Fundamentals; Kernel & VM; Security; Deployment and Component Platform Don’t be distracted by predictions that Windows 7 will have a new kernel. It’s going to be an evolution of the kernel shared by Windows Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008. I’ll be especially interested to see whether some form of the Hyper-V virtualization platform appears in Windows 7. If it does, I expect it will be in the enterprise version. The security challenges for Windows 7 are well known as well: refining User Account Control and hardening the kernel against new forms of attack. Read the entire list here I personally am looking for improvements to the Networking User Experience in Windows 7, its just too much in terms of the amount of networking related UI's. Here is a quote from the Networking Section of the ActiveWin Windows Vista Review I did in 2007: I love the centralization of Network and Sharing Center, in prior builds I was badly disappointed by networking overall in Vista, here is what I had to say about it: The networking wizard looks and feels clumsy. Common links are all over the place making the layout difficult for users to understand. You have these wizards with huge title bars that make you wonder why? It’s just not well thought out, and I wish there was more focus on consistency and ironically simplicity. I believe most of the functions first introduced in XP could remain the same and some could be slightly improved. For example, the Local Area Connection properties should be an Explorer instead of this same old dialog I have been seeing since Windows 95. Its just too much clicking, I had to open Network Center then click Manage Network Connections, right click the connection, click Properties, its a chore really. The primary focus has been lost and I think networking in Windows Vista has taken a definite step back and in some areas remains primitive. Come on, five to six windows for networking? Networking is still possible in Windows Vista and it can be accomplished with careful thought and planning. I was able to join a domain and network both my laptop and desktop using the traditional methods that we have known since prior versions of Windows dating back to Windows 95 which takes more than three clicks and seems very out of place with the changes to explorer. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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