I was a bit disappointed with the information that were presented in article form on the Engineering Windows 7 blog since its creation. It looked more like a clever Microsoft ploy to divert the attention away from Windows 7 by feeding the masses information about the creation process that would not specifically mention anything new about Windows 7. These posts were interesting from an engineering point of view but did not provide end users with any new information about Windows 7 itself, be it new features, requirements or planning.

Today one article for the first time directly mentioned Windows 7 and some of the options that Microsoft was considering in the development phase. The article is entitled “Reflecting on a few recent threads…” and it is symptomatic that the discussion has been kicked of by commentators of the blog rather than by the team itself. It honors them on the other hand that they read all the comments on their blog and react on them.

The new article about Windows 7 is basically talking about three suggestions - or requests - by some of the users who wrote comments in the blog. They are Profile-based setups, Out of Box Experience - “OOBE” and Windows Features.

Profile-based setups

Users have suggested that Windows 7 would offer the user a way to configure it for a specific use. Specific uses are for example gaming, business use or casual use. The comment by Steven Sinofsky was that while there were times that Windows was used for one specific purpose it usually was not. Instead of walking this road they took a look at ways to improve the performance of the system and gives an example about the indexing service and its low-priority I/O APIs.

The desktop PC (or laptop) is different because there is only a single PC and the roles are not as well defined. Only in the rarest cases is that PC dedicated to a single purpose. And as Mike in product planning blogged, the reality is that we see very few PCs that run only a specific piece of software and in nearly every study we have ever done, just about every PC runs at least one piece of software that other people do not run. So we should take away from this the difficulty in even labeling a PC as being role specific. Now there are role-specific times when using a PC, and for that the goal of an OS is to adapt well in the face of changing workloads. As just one example of this in Windows Vista, consider the work on making the indexer a low priority activity using the new low-priority I/O APIs. I know some have mentioned that this is “something I always turn off” but the reality is that there is an upfront cost and then the ongoing cost of indexing is indeed very low. And this is something we have made significant improvements in for Desktop Search 4.0 (released as a download) and in Windows 7. The reality is that a general purpose OS should adjust to the workloads asked of it. We know things are not perfect, and we know many of you (particularly gamers) are looking for every single potential ounce of performance. But we also know that the complexity and fragility introduced by trying to “outsmart” core system services often overshadows the performance improvements we see across the broadest sampling of customers. There’s a little bit of “mythbusters” we could probably embark on so — how about sharing the systematic results you have achieved and we can address those in comments?

Out of Box Experience - “OOBE”

So our context for the out of box experience would be that we don’t want to introduce complexity there, where customers are least interested in dealing with it as they want to get to the excitement of using their new PC. I think of it a bit like the car dealers who won’t hand you the keys to your car until you sit and watch a DVD about the car and then get a guided tour of the car—if you’re like me you’re screaming “give me the keys and let me out of here”. We think PC buyers are pretty much like that and our research confirms that around the world.

Windows Features

This is the part of the blog where Steven mentions that the development team is considering increasing to increase the features and programs that a user can remove after installing Windows 7. This would be the usual Add / Remove System Components dialog where that could happen.

For Windows 7, many have asked for us to make this list longer and have more features in it. This is something we are strongly considering for Windows 7 as we think it is consistent with the design goals of “choice and control” that you have seen us talk about here and quite a bit with Internet Explorer 8.0 beta 2.

Strongly considering does not mean it will be integrated. It would be very nice if they would do allow users to get rid of some of the features and programs in Windows 7 that are never used by them as long as they do not have dependencies with other features or applications that are used.

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