Upcoming Whidbey beta

re: Upcoming Whidbey beta

uestc95 — Thu, 24 Jun 2004 03:36:00 GMT

Goooooood

re: Upcoming Whidbey beta

Nathan — Thu, 24 Jun 2004 17:14:00 GMT

I think the transparency would be a Good Thing. Everything I've been reading online recently has something to do with Whidbey... "Oh look generics are awesome!", "How VS.Net 2005 will help you." etc. (I'm sure you know all of this ;-)

All we hear is that it will be great and that it is already shaping up really well.

Me: "So when will I get ahold of it?"
Available information: "Sometime after hell freezes over."

grrr

re: Upcoming Whidbey beta

Stuart — Thu, 24 Jun 2004 20:48:00 GMT

I'm the person who gave the feedback a couple of days ago that seems to have triggered this post.

First off, since I'm still getting used to the idea of the "new, transparent Microsoft" I have to say that I'm very impressed to get a direct response like this. It's not at all what I'd learned to expect from Microsoft in the past, and it's a VERY welcome change.

One thing that may be reassuring to the people who are worrying that outsiders can deduce the release dates, and that will reduce the press buzz. The examples I'm about to give are, admittedly, Microsoft's direct competitors so their names may or may not be well-received (I have no idea, obviously, what internal Microsoft feeling is about its competition) but regardless...

Everyone who bothers to check publically-available information knows that Mono 1.0 is coming out very shortly; everyone also knew that Beta was on its way long before it happened. But the first Beta still obtained a LOT of press, presumably because nobody in the press was subscribed to Mono's mailing list and tracking the development.

Similarly, every new release of Mozilla Firefox gets significant press, even though the dates are planned well in advance on public mailing lists and *all* the bugs, bug counts, blocker lists etc are public. Again, the press doesn't want to have to burrow into bug-tracking systems and mailing lists, so they wait for the press release.

Thus, the new releases are still reported as "new news" by the press, even though interested parties have known the date for ages.

Because there's such a pent-up demand for information, it's probably true that if someone inside MS revealed the date now, it would be all over the net within a few hours and some press would pick up on it. But if there were always a policy within Microsoft that it's okay to discuss this stuff openly, the pent-up demand wouldn't be there in future (interested parties would know that they could look on channel9 or asp.net for information at any time so there wouldn't be this feeding frenzy around any new tidbit) and the press wouldn't even notice. And then they'd pick up the MS press release as usual.

re: Upcoming Whidbey beta

Michael Earls — Sat, 26 Jun 2004 06:17:00 GMT

MSDN Universal exists for a reason. If you can't invest the money in such a program, do you really think you have a right to get angry when Microsoft doesn't give you free access to pre-releases of upcoming code? Isn't that why MSDN subscriptions exist? What benefit do I have as an MSDN Universal subscriber if you're going to start giving it all away?

Just curious. ;)

mark whidby

mark whidby — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 01:36:50 GMT

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