The Good and The Bad of Dogfood
When first becoming a Microsoft employee, I was excited to get to see and use many of our products before they were released to the public. Most people love to be the one of the first at trying out brand new software. After a while, the novelty wore off, however. When using pre-beta daily build versions of software like Visual Studio and Longhorn, you will see the not-so-pretty defects of incomplete code. Of course, this is expected and, with each new build, things get a little better. So over time you see a gradual improvement in the software. Now compare this to being a regular consumer that doesn't work at Microsoft. They jump from one version of Windows to the next without seeing all the unsightly defects that occurred along the way. I miss that feeling. Ah well, back to work.
