The Windows 7 team announced their new blog this week, the E7 blog, where they will keep us informed about developments with Windows 7 (W7). Er... or, will they? Seems the W7 team feels Microsoft has gotten ahead of themselves in the past by over discussing and floating trial balloons about new operating system features, implicating Windows Vista of course.
From the E7 blog:
We, as a team, definitely learned some lessons about "disclosure" and how we can all too easily get ahead of ourselves in talking about features before our understanding of them is solid.
Our intent with Windows 7 and the pre-release communication is to make sure that we have a reasonable degree of confidence in what we talk about when we do talk.
I think that pretty much says we're not going to back ourselves in a corner by saying too much. The initial E7 blog post says they will post frequently with posts from various team members. I'm not sure what those frequent posts are going to say if the W7 team isn't giving us much inside love about Windows 7. I suspect we'll see a lot of posts about upcoming events, such as the WPD and WinHEC conferences, and beta/release candidate news. How much else can you say without venturing into the "disclosure" issues E7 says it is going to avoid.
I expect W7 will follow the patterns we've seen from recent product releases like Windows Server 2008, Hyper-V and SQL Server 2008. And I would consider each of those successful product launches. The quality of what Microsoft has released in early and later release candidates has been very good. Microsoft has also done reasonably well meeting time frames for releases, even releasing early in some cases.
So, hang on as we'll likely see a lot of speculation without blog love from the E7 blog until much later down the road.
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