Programming Windows: 7 (Premium)

At the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) 2005, Bill Gates had noted that Microsoft didn’t hold this event every year. “It’s an event that we give when we have new tools, new foundation software, and new developer opportunities for you,” he said at the time. This explained why there wasn’t another PDC until 2008, when Microsoft announced its cloud push with Window Azure and the Windows 7 developer story, such as it was. But it doesn’t explain why Microsoft held yet another PDC just a year later, in 2009, as there were literally no new tools, foundation software, or new developer opportunities on offer.

Indeed, very little really happened between PDC 2008 and PDC 2009 on the Windows front.

As you may recall, Steven Sinofsky walked onto a stage at the former event and, with a little help from Julie Larson-Green, provided the first public overview of the user experience changes in Windows 7, a release that his team had been working on for over two years by that point, despite it being a minor, evolutionary update to Windows Vista. And then he walked onto a stage almost exactly one year later, with that product finally completed, and bragged about the process he had put in place to make it happen. Sinofsky’s PDC 2009 appearance was so content-free that the only thing worth mentioning is that he gave out a free Acer netbook to paid show attendees.

But we learned a lot about Mr. Sinofsky and his particular brand of leadership in the intervening year. We learned that Sinofsky was not at all interested in feedback from users, though he made a show of asking for that feedback to make enthusiasts feel like they were still being heard. What he was interested in instead was telemetry data---the automated usage information that his team had evolved Windows to include---and bug reports. Both of these forms of interaction ostensibly involved real people using Windows 7 in prerelease form, but they did so indirectly and impersonally. Telemetry data would show Sinofsky and his team, statistically, what was working and what wasn’t working. And bug reports helped them locate the biggest issues with the product: if enough people complained about the same thing, it would need to be fixed.

But Windows 7 as a product emerged from the depths of Redmond fully formed in 2008 and it was delivered in almost that exact form a year later, largely unmodified to address any concerns from the outside world. Aside from two major milestone releases and a more voluminous set of leaked interim builds, all we got from Sinofsky was a lot of pedantic explanation and exposition in the form of meandering “Engineering Windows 7” blogs posts.

A typical debate from this era concerned whether Windows 7 was a major or minor Windows release. My view at the time was that Windows 7 was a minor, evolutionary update to Windows Vista that could have easily been delivered more quickly and perhaps more appropriately as a feature update or service pack. ...