Windows 7: RC is nearly there
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in operating systems, Windows, Microsoft on
The Windows 7 team is hard at work. There’s a new build almost every day (if you’ve seen 7068 online, it could be real because many Microsoft employees are using it - although as it’s a Premium rather than Ultimate edition, it probably comes from an OEM partner because everyone at Microsoft tends to use Ultimate so they get BitLocker). There are no new features going into the release candidate beyond what’s getting announced on the Engineering 7 blog (which even Microsoft employees use to find out what’s going on, because they can see a feature discussed there before they’ve heard through the grapevine that it’s been signed off). The RC is getting close, says the director of OEM worldwide marketing, Mark Croft; “the development team is making some changes but we have a high degree confidence that we’re done and we’re on a good track to final testing and ship. The Windows experience team is very focused on catching all bug reports and there are other things going on behind the curtain - fit and finish and performance tuning. At the moment we’re trying to trend those bugs down because we have a zero-bug bar for shipping milestones like RC. I’ve noticed the teams I work with going into shutdown mode; their willingness to take even text changes is gone. That’s because they’re into localisation and you know when they’re there that they’re really getting finished.”
We’re hearing the same thing from the rest of the Windows team. When we were in Redmond last week, if we had bugs to report that they hadn’t seen, they wanted all the details. But when I asked if it was worth trying to persuade anyone that the Windows-E key combination should continue to go to Libraries (the way of the future) and not My Computer (meaning that where I want to go is another click away); ‘not for Windows 7′ came the answer. ‘There isn’t time.’
The week before at MIX I asked Steven Sinofsky if they’d looked at snapping windows into place on multiple screens and he told me that given how many people at Microsoft use multiple monitors (a far higher proportion than amongst mainstream users) they would like to work on the multi-monitor experience much more but there just wasn’t time for this release. And no, it’s not as easy as just stretching the taskbar across two monitors; not everyone wants that, and what about people who have three monitors, some of them stacked vertically?
There’s plenty of driver testing going on at the same time and both the Media Center and Tablet PC teams are still working closely with partners to develop experiences - think sports scores in the Media Center interface and multi-touch interfaces on the kind of machines Asus was previewing at CES. “There are a couple of Web service-oriented things that might pop up,” agrees Crofts but that’s not down to development questions; “they’re more dependent on business development deals.” Plus the Windows ‘8′ work has already started; after chatting with us, Mark Crofts was heading off to talk to the user experience team about the next version of Windows.
-Mary
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