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 doesn’t resonate as the feature-packed release consumers longed for after five years of development during a time of significant competitive pressures in the consumer space. Much of this is perception driven by those positioned to gain from misinformation; however, there are clearly lessons to be learned and improvements to be made. Perception and emotional connection are definitely related.

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 more quickly, interact with files and peripherals more meaningfully, and generally accomplish frequent tasks much more efficiently than when using XP. I’m more productive using Vista than XP. There are many reasons why Vista is a better client OS, but the majority of these reasons are related to more agile architecture, scalability, and new software development platforms. Vista provides a platform for amazing new software to be written; however, built-in applications (which are not actually part of “Windows”, but users don’t distinguish) didn’t consistently leverage these new platforms and therefore demonstrate the platform as an example.

In a nutshell, Vista has stronger roots as a technology release than a user-facing 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. Vista today is very compatible with devices and software; in fact, I’ve not yet encountered a piece of hardware or software that does not work with Vista that has been released in the past five years.

We needed Vista. Each of these new driver models and technologies were necessary to increase stability in the long term, and to springboard innovation for our future releases. 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. All this said, the 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. The company will also, very soon, respond to the perceptions and misinformation about Vista. As I mentioned earlier, I am an avid Vista user and am very happy with my experience (especially since the dust has settled after the release of SP1). Having been involved in planning and development of our next release (Windows 7) 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"