OSNews is Exploring the Future of Computing

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 25th Sep 2008 17:57 UTC

Back when Microsoft's Julie Larson-Green demonstrated Windows 7's multitouch framework during the All Things Digital conference, many noted the different taskbar that she was using on the demo machine. When Walt Mossberg asked her about it, she smiled and replied "It's something we're working on for Windows 7 and I'm not supposed to talk about right now, today..." Personally, I was quite intrigued by this revamped taskbar, seeing how static and old the current one already is (Windows 95, people). Microsoft has remained mum on the issue ever since, but last Tuesday, the silence was broken when Microsoft's Chaitanya Sareen posted a detailed entry on the taskbar on the Engineering Windows 7 blog.

2 · Read More · 33 Comment(s)

http://osne.ws/foo

Permalink for comment 331514
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.

RE: Speculation

by google_ninja on Thu 25th Sep 2008 19:14 UTC in reply to "Speculation"

Member since:
2006-02-05

A) The blog is info on how the windows team works, not specifics. The team was very open with vista, and got alot of expectations raised when they talked about directions they were going, or features they are working on. They have learned from that mistake, and have gone more "opaque".

B) The blog post was very high level about how they are thinking about the taskbar, what usage data they have accumulated, and what user feature requests are most popular. On top of that bulleted list, there is this paragraph

Here's a small sample of some things we've learned from our data, heard from our customers and what we've observed ourselves. One of favorite ways of gaining verbatim comments in a lab setting where we can validate the instrumented data but also gain in-depth context via interviews and questionnaires. In engineering Windows 7 we have hundreds of hours of studies like these. Please remember this is just a glimpse of some feedback this is not an exhaustive list nor it is implied that we will, or should, act upon all of these concepts.

You don't need to read between the lines, they explicitly say that it is just user requests that they are listing, not a feature list for windows 7.

Edited 2008-09-25 19:15 UTC

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 2