moreBuilding the next release of Microsoft Windows is an industry-wide effort that Microsoft approaches with a strong sense of responsibility and humility. Windows 8 reimagines Windows for a new generation of computing devices, and will be the very best operating system for hundreds of millions of PCs, new and old, used by well over a billion people globally.
We've been hard at work designing and building Windows 8, and today we want to begin an open dialog with those of you who will be trying out the pre-release version over the coming months. We intend to post regularly throughout the development of Windows 8, and to focus on the engineering of the product. Welcome to “Building Windows 8,” or as we call it, “B8.”
Welcome to Building Windows 8
- Thread starter Airbot
- Start date
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A while back they said they didn't want any feedback, I see they've changed their mind on that. 
Thanks Aaron!
Thanks Aaron!
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The sooner the better!
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This is the time to get hyped over features that are coming to Windows and stop speculating about rumors.
*sits back and waits
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*sits back and waits
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This is the time to get hyped over features that are coming to Windows and stop speculating about rumors.
*sits back and waits
Our wait may be coming to an end
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- In a really HOT place!
Let's see how much Microsoft will choose to reveal before BUILD.
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About this blog and your comments
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Thank you very much for the warm reception. It is humbling to see the amount of interest and enthusiasm for the blog and for Windows. We've been digesting all the comments (lots of mail is going around internally about specifics) and I've been going through my overflowing inbox (I can't reply to every message, but I have been replying)! Thank you. The most popular question/comment is about "signing up for the beta". We will be up front and very visible with any pre-release software programs that you can opt into. Promise.
As we begin our discussion of building Windows 8 on this blog, two housekeeping topics are worth a post before we start talking about building Windows 8 and the product. We want to be up front about the writing on this blog and provide a view on comments.
This blog is 100% authentic “engineer written” and not a marketing or communications effort. We do not have ghost-writers, editors, or any process that attempts to sanitize the words of folks on the team other than some basic copy editing.
This has the benefit of giving you truly authentic posts that directly reflect the passion of those developing the product. It also means that this blog is not written by professional writers. Some posts will go into a lot of detail. Posts by different writers will all have different “voices.” We ask that folks not be critical of the writing, keeping in mind the direct approach we are taking—I promise you that every writer will take personal comments, well, personally.
We had a long discussion about how to handle comments for Building Windows 8 (“B8&rdquo
Of course, the primary goal of this blog is to have a two-way dialog, so comments are an important part of what we’re looking for with our blogging efforts. So we opted for the commenting mechanism already used by thousands of MSDN blogs—anonymous comments are permitted, and they appear without moderation. This blog platform employs some minor security measures and a spam filter that we do not control.
That means we are seeking out comments. Everyone on the Windows team will be watching for comments and is looking forward to the dialog. When participating, we will work to make sure Microsoft employees represent themselves as such, especially indicating if they work on the area Windows being discussed. We ask that press (those that write, blog, tweet professionally) identify themselves accordingly as well.
Things we hope to see in comments:
We reserve the right to delete comments or otherwise edit what has been said. Things that will get comments edited or deleted:
- Lots of on-topic, good, interesting thoughts on Windows and the posts on B8
- Focus on the content of the post and not just the topic in general—seek out the details
- Dialog that is respectful and fun
We hope these rules will keep the discussion lively and on-topic.
- Offensive or abusive language or behavior as determined by a community standard
- Misrepresentation (i.e., claiming to be somebody you're not) — if you don't want to use your real name, that's fine, as long as your profile name isn't offensive, abusive, or misrepresentative
- Repeatedly posting the same comments or agenda, or attempting to fit a specific topic into every post, no matter what we blog about
- Blog-spam or link-abuse of any kind
--Steven
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Introducing the team
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Thanks for the comments and the flood of email we received (and to the number of folks now following us on Twitter, too). It is definitely humbling to see all the enthusiasm and interest. There are clearly already few important threads in the initial comments, some of which are based on the previews of the Windows 8 user experience. We’re definitely gearing up to discuss these issues, the design, and tradeoffs. Windows 8 has new features across the full breadth of the product. It takes quite a team to build Windows 8, and so I thought it would be a good idea to talk about the team structure—sometimes the “how” can help folks to understand the “what” and the “why.” This will give you an outline of the places we added features to Windows 8. It will also serve as a bit of a guide as we talk about the product.
It is tempting for some to think of Windows as one entity or group, or for some to think of Windows as just a set of specific people. Sometimes someone speaks at a conference or has a blog, and that comes to represent the product for you. In reality, Windows is always a product of the whole team and much of Microsoft. Nearly every development group contributes to building Windows 8 in some form or another. And Windows contributes efforts to most other groups as well.
Windows is a fairly broad project made up of a set of coordinated smaller projects. When we started building Windows 8 we had a clear sense of the direction we were heading and so we built a team structure to support that direction. Many of the teams work together while at the same time we try to break the work down into fairly independent groups—obviously as a customer you want things to work together, but as an engineer, you also want to be able to work independently. That’s a fine balance we work to maintain.
A lot goes into building a team structure to get all the work of Windows done. The most important first step is deciding “what” we plan to get done, so that we can make sure we have the best teams in place and the best structure to do that work. At the same time we have to make sure all the engineering processes—like daily builds, integration, quality, security, and all the fundamentals—are integral from the start (lots to talk about on these topics!).
We have several engineering roles, or disciplines, that make up our team. The implementation work on Windows happens when developers write code. This code implements features that come from specifications written by program management along with interaction designs from our product designers. Testers are responsible for making sure the spec is complete and the code does what the spec says it should do. This is a simplified view of the relationship between roles, since we routinely walk a bit in each other’s shoes. There are several other equally important roles on the team, but we tend to think of our engineering effort as development, test, and program management working together in lockstep throughout the entire release—each role has an equal voice in the outcome and choices we make.
We organize the work of Windows into “feature teams,” groups of developers who own a combination of architectural elements and scenarios across Windows. We have about 35 feature teams in the Windows 8 organization. Each feature team has anywhere from 25-40 developers, plus test and program management, all working together. Our teams are all focused on building a global product, and so some of our teams are located outside the US and are also delivering globally.
In general a feature team owns and builds what that most folks would identify as an area or component of Windows. “Feature” is always a tricky word—some folks think a feature is a broad architectural component like the "user interface” or networking, and other folks might think a feature is something more specific, like the “start menu” or IPv6. So the term is a bit overloaded. When we set up different feature teams, we pair the architecture (code, subsystems, components) with the scenarios (user experience) in which users will encounter it, while also working to make sure we keep teams small and manageable. We long ago stopped trying to count new features because of the difficulty in defining a feature. We do count work items, which do map to the work and specs that we build (but that is a pretty long list).
When folks do the math and come up with the number of developers on the team, we usually hear one of two reactions: “wow, that is a lot, and there is no way that can work,” or “wow, you build a product for a billion people with a pretty small number folks.” It is to our benefit to have the smallest number of people on the team possible, but it is to your benefit to have the largest number of people adding all the things that folks might want. So, we find a place in the middle. We want the team to be manageable and able to produce high quality, full-featured code.
I mentioned earlier that Windows contributes code to lots of other products and vice versa, so when you look at this list, keep in mind there are features from other groups (for example, our browser language runtime comes from the development tools group) and some of the work here goes into other products, too. For example, all of our kernel, networking, storage, virtualization, and other fundamental OS work is also part of Windows Server—that’s right, one team delivers the full Windows Client OS and much of the foundation for the Windows Server OS. And some features are built in the core OS but are ultimately only part of the Server product.
Many of the teams listed below describe features or areas that you are familiar with or that you can probably figure out based on the name. As we post more, team members will identify themselves as part of these teams. We also have organized these teams in seven larger groups that pull related teams together—fundamentals, devices and networking, core OS, developer experience, user experience, web services, and our engineering system. The Windows Live group (Hotmail, Messenger, Skydrive, Photos, LiveID, and more) also has a similar structure. Internet Explorer group is also a couple of teams on its own, but obviously contributes across Windows 8.
In addition to these teams made up of development, test, and program management, there are many others that are part of the product development team. Our content development team writes and edits our online assistance, website, deployment documents, and SDKs, to name a few things. Product planning leads customer and market research and also pays very close attention to feedback and telemetry around the pre-release software. Product design develops the overall interaction model, graphical language, and design language for Windows 8. Our research and usability team creates field and lab studies that show how existing products and proposed features perform with all types of customers. Localization brings Windows to over 100 languages (and localizes this blog). Our operations team runs services that are used by hundreds of millions of people and almost a billion PCs. Just to name a few..
- App Compatibility and Device Compatibility
- App Store
- Applications and Media Experience
- App Experience
- Core Experience Evolved
- Device Connectivity
- Devices & Networking Experience
- Ecosystem Fundamentals
- Engineer Desktop
- Engineering System
- Enterprise Networking
- Global Experience
- Graphics Platform
- Hardware Developer Experience
- Human Interaction Platform
- Hyper-V
- In Control of Your PC
- Kernel Platform
- Licensing and Deployment
- Media Platform
- Networking Core
- Performance
- Presentation and Composition
- Reliability, Security, and Privacy
- Runtime Experience
- Search, View, and Command
- Security & Identity
- Storage & Files Systems
- Sustained Engineering
- Telemetry
- User-Centered Experience
- Windows Online
- Windows Update
- Wireless and Networking services
- XAML
When we started Windows 7 some people told us that the Windows team was too big and had reached a size that caused more engineering problems than it solved. At the same time, you can look at all the comments and see the incredible demand for new features across a very wide range of scenarios.
Folks want new things, and changes to existing things; they want features to be available globally, to be accessible, and to be super high quality; they want things to work on existing hardware, and to take advantage of the latest new hardware. Our job is to get as much done in as short a time as possible, at a very significant scale. That's all a pretty significant engineering effort.
For folks who are counting my words, I am still under 1,500 words, so I think I will call this an introduction to the team. Keep the comments coming, as they are helping us get ideas for posts and shape the dialog. I hope this post helps to develop some shared context in terms of talking about Windows 8.
--Steven
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Sounds like things may be picking up soon.
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Good to see some form of announcement!
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Yup. I've bookmarked the "Building Windows 8" blog and am checking it every day. *hypemonster*
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MS BUILDING WIDOWS 8 BLOG.... AKA: B8... Did anyone else catch this???
In his intro the last months start of the Microsoft Building Windows 8 Blog, MS Blogger Steven Sinofsky said:
Does anyone else here, frothing at the mouth for Win8 betas, find this name as ironic as I do???
B8=BAIT!
:ROFLMAO:
In his intro the last months start of the Microsoft Building Windows 8 Blog, MS Blogger Steven Sinofsky said:
Does anyone else here, frothing at the mouth for Win8 betas, find this name as ironic as I do???
B8=BAIT!
:ROFLMAO:
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...lol...
:ROFLMAO:
:ROFLMAO:
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Good one... :ROFLMAO:
