I’ve been taking the Metro to work for the past three months. When you take public transportation for a decent period of time, you start to notice things you otherwise would casually dismiss. While on foot in downtown Seattle, I’ve taken notice of the ear-bud wearing, steadfast throng of pedestrians who move to their groove of choice in their very own solitary music filled bubble. 

This iPod-toting horde, mostly unaware of the social world outside their bubble, don’t seem to be distracted by the homeless who insistently seek jingling pocket change or that Starbucks mini scone being saved for later.

The ear-buds are an effective means to avoid this sometimes aggressive posturing from the homeless. I wonder what the global impact iPods have on the homeless? On the surface, I can envision both positive and negative scenarios.

What’s your take?

In past Windows releases, Microsoft came out of the gate hot and heavy during early development stages to talk about features, new capabilities for developers to harness, and how the ecosystem can benefit from new hardware support. This approach may seem positive on the surface in terms of translucency for both consumers and the ecosystem of hardware and software partners; however, the downside is significant, largely resulting in confusion or distraction.

Causing the Windows ecosystem to be unproductive in their investments is irresponsible and in the end hurts end users the most. The lack of solid video and sound drivers at general Vista availability are perhaps the best examples.

With the release of Windows 7, Microsoft is being deliberate about what is disclosed publicly and when. Everything discussed will be actionable for the ecosystem so they too can make deliberate investments. If all goes as expected, consumers will have a very clear and consistent message about what Windows 7 is about and what features they can expect.

This approach will no doubt come with mixed emotions, so I’m eager to hear what you think the right balance is between deliberate disclosure and open translucency.

I get asked this question so frequently that I thought I’d share my feelings more broadly. I personally feel Vista is a great alternative to XP, but is not a feature-packed release that customers hoped it to be after five years of development during a time of significant consumer competitive pressures. I use Vista every day, and have come to appreciate the many subtle improvements such as deeply integrated search. Vista looks more polished than XP too. I find that I’m able to navigate quicker, interact with files and peripherals more meaningfully via the action bar in Explorer, and generally accomplish mundane tasks much more efficiently than when using XP. There are many reasons why Vista is a better client OS than XP, but all of these reasons do not relate to new user-facing features.

In a nutshell, Vista was a technology release, not a big-impact feature release.

Because the focus in Vista development was on technology (the plumbing), we ended up with significant changes in all major driver models: networking, audio, and video; not to mention peripheral connectivity (e.g. USB and network attached devices). All of these major changes caused massive churn with our hardware partners, and ultimately led to a period of instability when the OS was released; just at the time when users expected a polished, rock-solid product. Now that SP1 is behind us, these instabilities from driver partners are largely gone.

We needed Vista though. Each of these new driver models and technologies were necessary to increase stability in the long term, and to springboard innovation for our next release. I don’t argue that Vista planning was not executed well, and such drastic changes should have been balanced better across releases (jog before sprint) to minimize user and partner impact – believe me, this was one of many lessons learned. Moreover, the product was positioned as a major feature release, when in reality, the features had near parity with XP. There are exceptions, for example integration of Media Center, but overall, the integrated applications shipped with Vista competed with high-profile free applications available on the Net that were already being adopted by XP users. All this said, the underlying OS advances made in Vista are allowing us to deliver best-of-breed features in our next release; for that, I am proud of the advances in Vista – even if they are mostly plumbing.

Changes in the company have been made (publicly for that matter) to address these areas by way of reshuffling of top talent and organization ownership adjustments. Having been involved in planning and development of our next release at many levels, I am very proud to say we have our MOJO back. I’m impressed every day at the quality of work, and progression being made. I have no doubt this next release will inspire confidence and a new found emotional connection for Windows users. I can’t wait to start talking about this work in detail. Stay tuned!

I should have already known this, but learned yesterday that you don’t have to manually traverse/modify/view the Windows Registry via RegEdit. From a command line, type reg /? to see your options. For example, I’m often reviewing a knowledge base article that involves viewing or editing a registry key. A quick copy/paste via the command line will really speed things up.

By way of example, if you wanted to see Outlook policies for HTTP RPC, you could type:

reg query "HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\RPC"

Some folks have been actively working toward getting OSX to run reliably on standard PC hardware. My favorite part of the Engadget article is "OSX isn’t really built for this hardware". Seeing folks try to get a great OS running on lots of different hardware configurations makes me appreciate Windows (and Linux) a little more. I’m betting an enormous number of problems exist in OSX that would be surfaced if Apple decided to license their software separate from their hardware. Alas, I don’t see this happening anytime soon if at all.

Why the long hiatus from posting? The primary reason is because I changed teams at Microsoft and needed some time to settle in. About four months ago I moved from Windows Networking in the Core Operating System Division (COSD) to the Network Media & Devices team within the Windows Experience (WEX) organization. Both COSD and WEX are part of Windows; however, WEX, as the name suggests, is focused on the consumer experience of Windows. My team in particular is focused on the challenge of making Windows the best experience for interacting with your pictures, music, video, and recorded TV; whether between Windows PCs or network media devices.

The new scenarios we’re enabling absolutely rock! I am incredibly energized by the work we’re doing, and from the great competition in the space (ahem… Apple). I have to be pretty tight lipped about this work, but as soon as the lid comes off, I’ll be posting very often. You’re going to be blown-away!

In the mean time, I owe you a post on the progress of my audio/video installation at my new home.

I recently purchased a new home, and anyone serious about home audio/video (like me) knows that moving is an opportunity to "do it right this time." The home is new construction, but unfortunately the builder didn’t do obvious things like run CAT5, so I’ll be doing a bit of "remodeling" with the help of my brother-in-law (who’s a great electrician) to do a clean installation. I thought I’d share the process with everyone, including pictures, in case it is of any help. I’ll start this series with what my goals are, and my new purchases to get the job done.

My primary goals are to: conceal all wiring and make the installation look as minimalistic as possible (while also future proofing), preserve as much floor space as possible, and ensure the entire entertainment/lighting experience can be easily controlled. Because of these goals, I’ve decided to sacrifice one of three (the middle one) small windows on the only wall a TV could possibly be mounted. Using a piece of AV furniture would have been way easier, but remember, my goal is to maximize floor space. There is a lot of light from other windows in the room, so I’m not really loosing anything if the install turns out the way I plan.

Seriously, this place was not designed for a media enthusiast. As fate would also have it, the built-in shelving system next to the fire place, where I had planned to place my equipment, is not wide enough for AV components. I could put an AV rack in my garage below the living room, but running up-and-down the stairs in the event I want to watch a DVD would be a pretty bad experience. I’m up for the challenge, so decided to cut out the shelves and custom install a Middle Atlantic swiveling AV rack. This will definitely require some custom work to keep with my goal of looking minimalistic.

Lastly, I’ll have to mount my surround left and right speakers (dipole drivers) on the back wall because I’d prefer to not hang the right one from a roof mount to keep decent symmetry. As you can see from the above picture, the main floor is very open and I feel having a roof-mounted surround over the main walk-way would not be aesthetically pleasing. The rear wall is about 4 feet behind the main listening position, so I’m not worried about this placement.

Here’s my order from Blue Jeans Cable:

• (2) 25-foot HDMI Series-1 Belden Bonded-Pair
• (2) 25-foot 1694A component video
• (1) 30-foot LC-1 subwoofer cable
• (1) 35-foot 1694A RF (coax) cable
• (3) 3-foot 1505A RF (coax) cable
• (2) 3-foot 1694A (coax) digital audio cable
• (2) 3-foot optical digital audio cable
• (1) 250-foot spool Belden 12AWG 5000UE speaker cable
• (1) 25-foot wire for IR blaster in rack (1/8" jack)

Gulp! My next post will show how I run the wires and how I’ll mount the TV. Following posts will show the finished product with tidy wiring job. I’ll show off my Vista Media Center too.

Advice is always welcome (but you’d better speak up now because I have a lot of work to do and I’m moving in 4 days!)