I like others was a bit skeptical of this Windows 7 blog when it arrived a few weeks ago. I thought it would be light on details but thus far it’s quite the opposite – much like Steven’s internal blog. If they keep up the level of recent posts, there will be a huge amount of knowledge about Windows before this OS releases and a lot less room for rumours and speculation. I’ve seen plenty of posts about Windows in the past that range for speculative to wildly uneducated and unless you’ve been inside a team building an OS (I haven’t) I think it’s hard to understand the complexity and integration challenges they face. It’s also easy to overlook some of the minutiae of the building and testing process and comments like this one bore that out for me

 

Because of the inherent tradeoffs in some architectural approaches, we often introduce conditional code that depends on the type of hardware on which Windows is running.

 

I didn’t really grasp that level of work went on, let alone the testing across many many machine configurations of RAM, CPU, disk speed and disk type to mention a few. This is a BIG difference we have from Apple and though it’s one of the benefits of Windows (a wide choice of hardware, price, performance) it’s also something of a ball and chain. I really don’t know but my guess is if the Vista team had built that OS to work on one or two specific pieces of hardware we’d have seen a VERY different outcome. That’s not an excuse, just an observation of something that is obvious but often overlooked by commentators – including me.

Anyway, if you have time take a read of Windows 7 -- Approach to System Performance. It’s both enlightening and a sign of the level of education that the market can now expect from the Windows team.

Measuring the scale of a release is also worthy of a read.