Microsoft really empower their Windows 8 development teams

You can get to it here. As I have said before, it’s been a really novel and fresh approach to software life cycle development. At the end of this process, when Windows 8 is launched, nobody will be able to credibly say, Microsoft didnt care about the customers and didn’t listen to feedback. That would be nonsense. There is however something else that has impressed me. Steven Sinofsky seems to have empowered his senior development staff and given them the largest stage that they will probably ever have to express their thoughts and concepts. In the last blog post they released, take a look at this paragraph:

We’ve been having a lot of discussion regarding the two recent posts on the Windows 8 Start experience. Those of you who have used the Developer Preview are contributing to our understanding of your individual usage patterns and what is easier or more difficult than in Windows 7. As a reminder, we released Windows Developer Preview build with the full product “enabled” even though we still had much feature work to do in the user interface. We did this in order to foster the dialog and we want folks to understand that the product is not done. We’ve seen some small amount of visceral feedback focused on “choice” or “disable”—a natural reaction to change, but perhaps not the best way to have a dialog leading to a new product. We’re going to focus this post on making sure we heard your constructive feedback around the design as we continue to evolve it. Marina Dukhon, a senior program manager lead on the Core Experience team, authored this post focused on specific comments and the actions we are taking based on what you have said. –Steven

In the post before that:

Fundamentals such as memory usage represent a key engineering tenet of Windows 8. In building Windows 8 we set out to significantly reduce the overall runtime memory requirements of the core system. This is always good for everyone and especially in a world where people want to run more and more apps at the same time or run on systems with only 1 or 2GB of memory. The laptop we talk about in this post is the exact same one we talked about at the Windows 7 PDC in 2008 – an off-the-shelf, first-generation, ATOM-based netbook with 1GB of memory. This post details our efforts around memory footprint and was authored by Bill Karagounis, the group program manager of our Performance team. –Steven

Now I’m not trying to get all sentimental here and say that Microsoft is the greatest place to work blah blah blah.. I will say that it’s pretty cool when your (world famous) boss takes the time and trouble to let you shine and give you exposure. Senior management around the world could learn a thing or two from this man. In this scenario, it’s a win win situation. His team is clearly talented and that comes across and he gets credit for letting them shine. I can’t speak for the whole company but I can say this looks pretty good looking in from the outside. Just my 10 cents.  ]]>