PoliTech's Journal: MS Blog Announces Windows 7 Plans for New and Improved Bloat

Talk about not learning from one's mistakes...

The Windows 7 Team

Theres a lot to building an org structure for a large team, but the most important part is planning the work of the team. This planning is integral to realizing our goal of improving the overall consistency and togetherness for Windows 7. So rather than think of one big org, or two teams, we say that the Windows 7 engineering team is made up of about 25 different feature teams.

In general a feature team encompasses ownership of combination of architectural components and scenarios across Windows. Feature is always a tricky word since some folks think of feature as one element in the user-interface and others think of the feature as a traditional architectural component (say TCP/IP). Our approach is to balance across scenarios and architecture such that we have the right level of end-to-end coverage and the right parts of the architecture. One thing we do try to avoid is separating the plumbing from the user interface so that teams do have end-to-end ownership of work (as an example of that, Find and Organize builds both the indexer and the user interface for search). Some of the main feature teams for Windows 7 include (alphabetically):

Applets and Gadgets
Assistance and Support Technologies
Core User Experience
Customer Engineering and Telemetry
Deployment and Component Platform
Desktop Graphics
Devices and Media
Devices and Storage
Documents and Printing
Engineering System and Tools
File System
Find and Organize
Fundamentals
Internet Explorer (including IE 8 down-level)
International
Kernel & VM
Media Center
Networking - Core
Networking - Enterprise
Networking - Wireless
Security
User Interface Platform
Windows App Platform

Though its fascinating to watch Microsoft alienate IT professionals by using such terms as "Plumbing" when describing operating system functionality, and yet still expect to be taken seriously, it's really just a shame.

Microsoft's Marketing people can keep assuming that IT folks are idiots who will buy into such nonsense and the IT folks will just keep using Windows XP for their current Desktop OS needs, all the while slowly migrating users to purely Linux, BSD or Apple Desktop environments (though the migration will go faster and faster as application developers catch on to the changing market). The IT folks will also likely keep pressuring the companies that they work with to follow their lead ... just as when those same IT folks were alienated by, and migrated away from the Notes, Novell, and IBM-OS2 guys. Good luck with that Microsoft!

For those of you interested in a well performing version of Windows, take a good look at Tiny XP. It's fast, it works, it's bare minimum, and when you need a feature you can add it from your license copy of XP Pro. How is it that only the Windows user community can significantly "Improve" Microsoft's OS?

Will Microsoft wait until Open Source OS's have captured 20 percent of the market before actually engineering something new ?

Windows must embrace true 64 bit, Multithreading, and need only run legacy applications in a Virtualized environment (Thinstall and VMWare are proof that this can be done, and done well).

MS needs to make optional such things as Internet Explorer, Media Player, and rid the OS entirely of all of the useless hidden DRM subsystems that eat away at Vista's system performance (These hidden DRM processes do not serve Microsoft's customers ... you know, the people and organizations who actually PAY Microsoft's bills).

Windows desperately needs "root" style user account and permission management (No! UAC security "theater" is not enough security).

I could go on all day, but it looks like running a copy of Windows Server 2008 is going to get you 90 percent of the way to "Windows 7", and that all that this team seems intent on doing is re-adding the missing bloat.

Funny thing when reading the comments on the Team Blog, the MS team are currently being "gamed" into believing that perfecting Vista's bloat is what the user community actually wants. These comments are obviously written by astroturfing stealth Apple and Linux commentors.

It's quite amusing really.