I’ve been emailing my Windows 7 feedback and concerns to Steven Sinofsky, most of which are stated in my earlier editorial here on GeekSmack. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that Windows 7 is a bad OS whatsoever; I’ve been using it as my main operating system for a while now on my personal PC and laptop, but I definitely think that it needs more time to mature, and that in Microsoft beta programs more bugs need to be fixed. I mean, sometimes I feel like if the “mass” media and blogosphere didn’t make such a big deal out of the UAC issue, for instance, it wouldn’t have been fixed.

So, Sinofsky and I were emailing on this matter back and forth, and I asked him for a comment on everything said. Here’s what he had to say:

I have to be honest and say that it is awkward to comment because you’re sort of suggesting we’re not doing the best job we could in engineering Windows 7 and then asking me to defend against that assertion.  Quite the contrary we are incredibly focused on building a great release and incorporating feedback from the beta.  We have received an amazing amount of feedback, many suggestions for new features too, during the beta—over 500,000 suggestions just from the Send Feedback button (which is only one of many feedback mechanisms).  Putting that in perspective it is 500 suggestions for each and every developer on the Windows team, just since beta!  That is clearly a lot of interest in refining Windows 7, even if a very significant portion of these are suggestions for entirely new features.  We take all of them very seriously. 

The other part of the challenge in answering to your assertion is that when you say we’re rushing or rushed, it implies we are behind schedule or trying to finish ahead of schedule.  Neither of those are true. As we talked about at the PDC, we will have a Release Candidate after the Beta and then RTM—this was reiterated in a blog recently as well, again with no change at all in the plan.  And of course,  our development partners such as OEMs and IHVs, as described at the PDC and in the post, continue to receive builds frequently.  Recently we’ve seen people talk about “RC Builds” and the like.  First, all builds since the beta are RC builds since by definition that is the next milestone.  But by far the most humorous element has been that the build numbers blogged about are higher than our current build.  Today’s build is 7046, but it hasn’t completed yet :-)

Stay tuned for some discussion of the changes we have made based on the feedback…there are hundreds of changes based on all those suggestions and of course many fixes based on the telemetry we have been receiving. 

This email was received on 1:09 AM EST, and that’s 10:09 PM Redmond (Pacific) time, so I don’t know if he meant that 7046 was Thursday’s build or if it’s Friday's build, but the reason that we weren’t able to find out the build tag yesterday was because it hasn’t been compiled yet. This confirms it; Build 7048 DOES NOT exist yet.

Source: In-House

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