I love the fact that Win7 has ISO burning built-in.
I’m running a pre-release build of Win7, and after downloading the ISO from the internal shares (not from the web :), I just pop in a DVD-R, double-click on the ISO and:
Twenty minutes later, I’m happily upgrading to the RTM.
I’m not entirely sure what these folks are thinking, but I’m getting a little worried about our marketing budget… :)
In case you don’t want to watch the whole thing, this, by the way, comes after “Get Ready for PowerPoint”.
Office 2010 Technical Preview is coming up. If you’re interested in getting in on it, check out the nomination info on the PowerPoint team blog.
Btw, this movie is crazy. I wish I knew where they were going with it (you’d think they’d tell me, but they don’t).
The guy who writes the minimsft blog has a nicely honed sense of irony.
And you know, speaking of The Commons: I trekked over there today (meh, not the sunniest day) and I have to say it's an impressive space. I walked around admiring the scope of the project, thinking "This is what Windows built. This is what Office built." I then reflected on the irony that it's Mr. Robbie Bach's Entertainment and Devices moving into the new campus with The Commons. Windows and Office funded this extravagant place for the folks who managed to burn through $8,000,000,000USD+ on the Xbox, be shown how it's done right from Nintendo with the Wii, dash the Zune against the juggernaut iPod, and have the iPhone drop-kick WinMobile to Mars.
On a good day, I can convince myself that these are important businesses to be in, and we can afford to lose money to be successful in these business.
Most of the time however, I just try to happily enjoy my XBox 360, Zune, WM6.5 (beta) phone, Media Center, and beautiful keyboard, and try to ignore the fact that I’m paying for all of those products via my stagnant stock (and my nearly 10 years of work on Servers, Windows and Office – all extremely profitable businesses that are funding that E&D campus).
So, thanks for the nice products, E&D. And, you’re welcome.
I’ve often gotten the idea that a Yahoo! Product Manager is more or less the same as our Program Management. Their new CEO, whose attitude I like (she happily discourses on the things she thinks are ridiculous about their products – something that she’ll start to stop doing once stuff is built under her), seems to have a proverbial bee in her proverbial bonnet about (at least some) Y! product managers. From their Q109 quarterly earnings call:
“We sort of had one product management person for every three engineers. So we have a lot of people running around telling people what to do but no-one is f**king doing anything. [apology]. The point of the matter is first we’re getting all of the engineers, like, on the same page; we’re getting rid of a lot of those product people that, you know, whatever.”
First, I’d love to talk to the person who has to generate the transcript for that call. That cursing is now filed for eternity with the SEC. :) Second, good for her recognizing that there are too many PMs running around doing basically nothing.
In my ongoing search for “truth and enlightenment” when it comes to the PM job, it’s been very clear to me that Program/Product management is one of those jobs in which the PM can be basically irrelevant. Even more problematic, the PM can easily be a hindrance to the running of the project.
To the first point, there is fundamentally only one job discipline that is irreplaceable in a software development, and that’s the one that types the braces, semi-colons and/or angle-brackets. If your job does not involve doing that, then your job is not critical. PM, for the most part, does not involve coding. So PMs, are, by definition, extra weight.
To the second point, the PM occupies a unique position in most software engineering structures – sort of the hub of a bumpy wheel (with dev, QA/test, design, usability, marketing, planning, customer support, etc. being the spokes). The PM at that position can wield a lot of influence, but can also slow things down, create confusion, and can also basically become pompous little buggers.
I often ask PMs to remember the first part, to create some humility, and the second to create a sense of responsibility.
Ultimately, the combination of these two failure scenarios for PMs means that many, many PMs fail while still on the job. In short, a PM who suffers from the second problem will be sooner or later relegated to irrelevancy by other spokes of the wheel. But since they probably still run around producing good PowerPoint decks, their irrelevancy will not be noticed by the management of the organization.
At least until a new Sheriff rolls into town with different ideas.
Several years ago, at the beginning of the “Longhorn” project (which eventually became Windows Vista), I worked on a project that was attempting to solve the problem of how to make file sharing in small networks (particularly at home) both simple and secure – something that, frankly, Windows has been working for a long time.
I worked with a small team of architects from across Windows to develop a technical concept that was eventually codenamed Castle†. Castle eventually became a fairly major project in Longhorn. Details of this project have trickled over the years, but since it never shipped in any usable form, it’s not widely known or understood, though some have tried to figure it out.
The Castle idea
Castle was based on the idea of creating a small network (typically in a home environment) with a shared concept of user accounts. In typical home networks, the main gating factor in a simple, secure sharing model is that the PCs each have their own idea of the users – a user on one PC doesn’t even “exist” on the other PCs. Earlier versions of Windows have approached this by having a password-based sharing model (the user create a password, and tells it to other people who want to get stuff from their PC), or having a completely open sharing model (put something in a particular folder, and anyone on your local network can get to it).
With Castle, the user accounts were shared with all PCs, with changes made to the user account information on one PC replicated to the other PCs automatically. A user on one PC could share pictures with the other members, and, using standard permissions model, make decisions about who could see what. Any single user could also log on on any of the other PCs using their own account (with replicated settings, of course). The advantage of this model from a technical perspective was that it would take advantage of all of the security and file sharing features that users in a corporate domain have used for years.
The interesting* thing about Castle, however, was that it was built around a model of home networks that assumed that, for the most part, home PCs were shared by users in the home. At the time (early 2002), home networks were uncommon, but were growing in usage, but typically, they were an extension of the home PC – two or three PCs shared by the users of the home, occasionally with one or more them primarily used by one person.
On HomeGroup
Contrast the model of Castle with this description of observations from the HomeGroup post on the Engineering 7 blog:
A majority of the computers in our panel only had one primary user. While we all know that laptop sales have overtaken desktop sales in the last couple of years, this data tells us that people are buying PCs more for specific people rather than for a shared location [emphasis mine].
HomeGroup is solving the same things that Castle was trying to solve – simple and secure sharing of documents, media and devices. But, this simple shift in the dynamics of home networks from shared PCs to single-owner PCs suggests a change in the solution. Instead of attempting to create a shared concept of user accounts, HomeGroup assumes a network of “equals and peers”, and uses the concept of a single shared password (a well-chosen analogy in the E7 blog compares this to the concept of the front-door key in a home) to build a trust relationship between the home PCs on top of which the media sharing, libraries and search features are layered.
Evolution of ideas
Some have postulated that HomeGroup is basically dusting off and shipping Castle. I’m not part of the team building HomeGroup (nor was I part of the Castle team at the end – I had switched focus to Wireless and Bluetooth projects and handed off the project to another team), but the Castle project ultimately died as a victim of the Longhorn reset in 2004 – at its height, it had grown to be a joint project of at least four different Windows teams. Like HomeGroup and its integration with Win7 technologies, Castle had pieces that depended on WinFS and other Longhorn technologies that never shipped in any form. It’s highly unlikely, given the different fundamental directions of Castle and HomeGroup, that they share any code.
In a world of single-owner PCs, Castle would, frankly have been overkill. If Castle had existed, the current HomeGroup concept could have been built on the base framework, but instead, like much of Windows 7, HomeGroup is a simpler, easier-to-use solution to the same fundamental problem Castle was trying to solve. HomeGroup was most likely built from scratch and integrated with other Windows 7 concepts and technologies (NLA, Libraries, Media Player sharing).
What the Castle and HomeGroup projects ultimately did share was the desire to make home sharing simple and secure‡ that Windows teams have been trying to solve for years. I don’t have enough PCs with Win7 at home yet to fully try out the HomeGroup feature, but from everything I’ve seen, the team seems to have delivered a simple and effective solution to the problem we set out to solve over six years ago.
Windows 7 seems to be, yet again, living up to the promise of Windows Vista.
/fin..
† On naming: One early set of notes I still have that was written by one of the technical architects, Richard Ward (currently a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer in the Windows Core Architecture group), used the term “Minidomain.” I toyed with the codename “dominion” -- a play on “mini domain” – but it didn’t really catch on. The idea for the final codename originated with Andrew Sinclair, the GPM of my team at the time (currently General Manager of Hosted Exchange) and one of the inventors of the Castle concept, who opined, in his typically British way, during brainstorming, “A man’s home is his castle.”
I wrote most of the early scenario documents related to the project (used to flesh out and sell the concept), which made it easy for me to be the one to choose the codename. I latched onto the word “castle” from Andrew’s quip, which worked since it had the same medieval echoes of its technological ancestor, the Windows Server domain (a domain is a Windows enterprise concept of centrally administrated network systems). It was also a perfect analogy for what we were trying to build – a wall of protection around a set of PCs.
As a side note, we did spend quite a bit of time brainstorming with marketing about a branded name to use in the product. I had a moment of panic when, in one of these meetings, the marketing team got quite excited when I jokingly tossed out the name “workgroup .net” – the term “.net” was making the rounds in the company as the popular term to add to things, and Castle was, as HomeGroup is, an evolution of the long-existing idea of a workgroup. I think we can all breathe a sigh of relief that the “.net” fad has run its course.
* There were plenty of interesting things about Castle, for what it’s worth. Castle was, as was typical of Longhorn-era projects, quite ambitious. In my first scenario documents that I used to popularize the idea around the company, I had designs not only for simple and secure file sharing (the primary goal), but also for ways to potentially revolutionize concepts like application installs (install an app on one PC, and, via the secure mechanisms we were developing, we could replicate the application and its settings to the same user account on all of the PCs in the home, making it easy, as a user to move from one PC to another – obviously this would have required changes to the way apps were licensed, but we had a number of ideas for how to, for example, allow a user to use the app on only one PC at a time). I talked with the Windows Update team about using the Castle framework to distribute patches within the home after one system downloads them (patch distribution has be done via a secure distribution because systems basically install them automatically, so if someone can insert bad code that would be a bad thing). I also spent some time with the media player DRM team on techniques to automatically license downloaded music to all PCs in the home. We didn’t really plan to ship all of this in Longhorn, but we wanted to to lay a foundation for building features and applications in future versions of Windows that could rely on a secure, trusted home network.
‡Simple and secure – I harp on this phrase, because it’s relatively straightforward to make home sharing simple, and other products have made strides in that direction. It’s also easy to make home sharing secure – just lock everything down :). It’s a real challenge to bridge both concepts.
Not too long ago, I joined the PowerPoint team. Thought I spend most of my time working on a related project, I do spend a lot of time working with PowerPoint itself, and I’m constantly amazed at the things that people do with PowerPoint.
Recently, on the PowerPoint blog, Ric posted an entry about a series of new template documents that show you how to create amazing and useful effects in PowerPoint 2007 created by one of our MVPs, Julie Terberg.
Check them out on Office Online.
Something’s going on the interwebs. I think it might be hell freezing over.
That’s really cool! I wonder who is working on that stuff.
In a detailed post over on E7 about the Win7 design process comes this:
With regard to where ideas come from, what we like to say is that the job of program management is not to have all the great ideas but to make sure all the great ideas are ultimately picked. The best program managers make sure the best ideas get done, no matter where they come from.
A nice formulation to add to my various other definitions of Program Management collected over the years.
Move stop-and-refresh back to where they were in IE6
![image_thumb[11]](https://blogs.msdn.com/blogfiles/justsean/WindowsLiveWriter/LittlethingsyoumaynothavenoticedinIE8Par_FD7/image_thumb%5B11%5D_6cf6ee9c-86ab-47c6-968b-d231eba5f2b9.png "image_thumb[11]")
This was going to be my first post in this series, but the Vista Team blog stole my thunder with a much more detailed post covering lots of the chrome customizations, so I left it for last. :) Be sure to check it out the Vista blog.
PS. A quick reminder: I don’t work on IE, and I haven’t for nearly a year. So this all qualifies as my personal opinion, and not the opinion of the IE team. I found all of these feature just by playing around with IE (okay, well, some of them I knew where to look -- but I didn’t necessarily know they had made the final release)
Authenticated RSS Feeds
When we first released the Windows RSS platform a number of people asked us about authenticated feeds. As I said in those posts, it was a hard cut for IE7, but I’m really happy to see that it’s here for IE8 :)
To set up an authenticated feed, just subscribe to it, and then go to the properties for the feed (on the right in the feed view), and you’ll see the “settings” button for the User name and password. Click, fill in the details and go.
Of course, anything that uses the RSS platform will get this new feature for free, including the Feed Headlines gadget that ships with Vista, and Windows Live Mail. Outlook uses its own download engine, so this won’t help if you were trying to use Outlook.
Trivia o’ the day: One of the key drivers for making this work was the Web Slices feature. It turns out there are far more web pages behind authentication than there are feeds, and since Web Slices are implemented using the Windows RSS Platform, it was natural to implement support for authenticated feeds for all types of feeds.
Clone your current place
One of the nice things about the “New Window” (Ctrl-N) feature dating back to early releases of IE, is that it always duplicates the current open window, as well as all of its state – in particular, the window’s history.
When the “New Tab” feature was created back in IE7, I remember discussing with Aaron how IE could recreate the New Window behavior for Tabs. Unfortunately, it didn’t make the cut for 7, but I’m thrilled to see it make it into 8 (along with a ton of other tab-related new features).
The valuable thing about Duplicate tab (Ctrl-K) is that it allows IE8 to support both of the two most common search-and-discovery patterns on the web. The two patterns are as follows:
Breadth-first
Let’s say you’re searching for information on IE8. You head up to your address bar and type in “ie8” (which, we’ve learned, will take you to your search engine). Looking at the results, you see a four or five likely sites, so, using Ctrl-click (or middle-click), you open several of them in background tabs. Then, once you have several candidates open, you switch over to them one-by-one to explore them.
This model of search-and-discovery is fully supported by the tab features in IE7 (and other browsers) today. But, there’s another model.
Depth-first
Interestingly, prior to tabbed browsing, this was the predominant model for finding information (using New page). Let’s say that you are searching for dinner menus at cuban restaurants. So you do a quick search for “cuban restaurant menus”. You then click on the first likely result, and navigate through the site until you find the menu. Now you’ve found it, you want to go back to the hub and find another, without losing the page you’re on.
This model is supported by the new Duplicate tab feature. With this feature, you hit Ctrl-K to duplicate your current tab, then hit back to get back to your search result page, and click on the next link to explore. The page you were on is left alone on its own tab until you are done with it.
The depth-first model is used when you are looking for specific pages deep within a site that may not be easily categorized at the top level. Prior to IE8, it wasn’t possible to do search-and-discovery using tabs.
This small feature reflects a theme of IE8 that should become clear over time: There are a lot of great major features which you’ll read about blogs and the news, but deep down, you’ll find that what the team did during planning and development was to research and hone in on common patterns of using the web and build in features – large and small – to make those patterns easier or more refined.
Use your address bar for searching
A little-known fact is that IE has always had a combination address-bar/search box (this goes back to at least IE6). Well, to be fair, I thought this was fairly well-known until reviewers starting going nuts over the Omnibox™.
If you enter a single word with no spaces, IE has always tried to find a site with that term, and then, if it failed to find one, it went to your search provider. But if you entered two or more words, it went straight to your default search engine. A little-known way to do single word searches quickly is to start typing into the address bar with a question-mark and space (as in the example above), which forces IE to always send your text off to your search provider.
Some people wonder why a separate search box is necessary. The search box’s primary value is to provide a prominent reminder that the browser can help them with the common internet task of searching. From a design point-of-view, however, the search box allows the browser to assume that the primary intention is searching for new things (with a secondary intent of searching for something you’ve searched for before). In IE8, because of this knowledge of user intent, the browser provides several features optimized around internet search, ranging from the quick pick feature to visual search suggestions. The address bar, by contrast, is optimized around navigation – getting you to sites that you know about already, or have visited before (so the drop-down includes your typed URLs, your history, your favorites and feeds).
In IE8, it was important to the team to continue the tradition having a unified address bar/search, but also to enable address-bar-searchers to get access to the cool new features that were being developed for the search box – like Visual Search Suggestions. The UX team built a great shared component known during early development as the GUP, or Grand Unified Picker (Bruce, the development lead who named it in jest, was unhappy that the name stuck, so he eventually forced it to be renamed. :), which allowed both the the address bar and the search box to provide a single drop-down experience across a number of different data sources – some local (like history) and some remote (like visual search suggestions), with a mix of text and images.
The IE team has pulled this off this complex piece of work beautifully. As noted above, the drop-down in the address bar is optimized for navigation scenarios. But, if you start typing in the address bar with a question-mark, IE knows immediately that you intend to do an Internet search, so it immediately swaps in the search-optimized drop-down (which also includes history search after the search-engine supplied suggestions). [Note: it should also do this as soon as you hit two words in the search, but it doesn’t do this in the current Beta. I don’t know if it will be addressed for the final release].
Bonus tip:
The address bar also includes built-in reminders of, and quick access to, some common navigation shortcuts. Click on the arrow at the bottom of the address-bar drop-down to see them.
Can’t resist section:
OmniBox™ + AwesomeBar™ == Smart Address Bar :)
PS. Chrome’s Omnibox gets one thing right – the autocomplete behavior. I’ve said before that IE’s autocomplete is one of my favorite features, and I’m sad that it’s missing from this beta of IE8. They also have a hard-to-use (but visually compelling) implementation of keyword search shortcuts similar to something we planned early in IE8, but which was one of the early cuts (IE has had this feature at least since IE6, but it requires delving into the registry to enable).
Searching the future
This morning I wanted to find out where I read about that “Skymarket” initiative. Off to IE, type in “skymarket” and it shows me not just Long Zheng’s original post, which I had read but also Joe Wilcox’s commentary, which I hadn’t read yet.
What happens is that IE is searching across not just my history, but also across the titles of feeds and feed items – so I can find not just what I’ve already seen, but also the new things from people and sources I find interesting.
A little interesting side-note: the ability to search favorites, history and feeds is provided by the Windows Search indexing platform, which is really cool. It really showcases the value of having fast, efficient indexer built-in to the platform. Without it, the team would have had to install its own indexer – and having two indexers running on the same system is a recipe for performance problems.
Formatted View Source
You don’t have to be a pro developer to love this one. Since the very beginning, IE has relied on the built-in Notepad editor to show page source. Notepad, it should be noted is not a source viewer.
In IE8, for the first time, the IE team itself took on ownership of the core development experience, making a deep investment in built-in developer tools. In the past, the developer experience belonged to the Visual Studio team (and the professional developer is still well-served by using that product for end-to-end development), but with the experience with the intern-developed Developer toolbar in IE7, the team realized that there is a place for a lightweight, built-in set of development tools.
A great side-effect of the deep work is that the team developed a great source viewer, and hooked it up as the default “View Source” app.
Bonus tip: If you have a better app (Notepad++ has been my standby for years) for source viewing/editing, don’t forget you can always change the editor to anything else by using the Programs tab in Internet Options. For my needs, however, I don’t think I’ll need anything more.
