President of Windows: Windows 7 development relies on responsibility

A lot of people criticized Steven Sinofsky for being tight-lipped, but the president of the Windows department has always believed that he was cautious rather than deliberately obscured.

"Everyone wants to know about the upcoming release and the next release." But Sinowski believes that publishing information too early is actually a bad thing, and that will only lead to failure.

"Product development information is not useful to everyone," Sinowski said in an interview at the PDC conference this week.

Sinowski believes that no customer is willing to see how potatoes are peeled in restaurants and then taste half-cooked food. Again, he is not willing to talk about products under development.

"It's hard to imagine how everyone thinks about products under development," Sinowski said. "I don't want to watch the movie clips taken every day. We want to see the final version of the director's clip. "

Therefore, Microsoft did not officially show Windows 7 until last year's PDC conference, which is exactly one year away. Microsoft's approach is significantly different from the first show of Longhorn (development code) in 2003. At the time, Microsoft delayed a lot of geniuses to officially showcase Longhorn, and the final release of Vista was very different from the original show.

From the initial situation, Sinowski seems to have reached expectations. Although Vista has been criticized by users, so far, Windows7 sales have been good, and critics have given it a high rating.
In the period leading the Office development team, Sinowski has always adhered to such a management philosophy.

"Ordinary people do ordinary things," he said.

This is why he doesn't care about public comment before the software development is completed.

"Software screenshot comments are of little value to us," he said.

Sinonovs entered the Windows division in March 2006. Earlier this year, he officially took over the Windows business and became the president of the department.

He said that his management philosophy of the Windows department can be described in terms of responsibility. “There is no software project that faces 1 billion users like us, and our development team has been developing very, very seriously,” he said.

Sinowski is a person who is not subject to outside criticism. If you want him to pay attention to certain problems, then use numbers to illustrate. He said he would like to see feedback, but he would prefer that the feedback "is based on exact data, not based on guesswork or inference."

At the PDC conference on Wednesday, he mentioned a project development method similar to "hormone engineering."

"In fact, we have done a lot of things in this way," Sinowski said. Many times, this approach can help us decide which features to include in the next version of the product.

"I said it directly," said Sinowski. "Like you ask for advice from your 10 friends, we also decide new features in new products."

Today, Microsoft has been able to collect large amounts of user usage data from the real world. Sinowski said that many times, this data will show what Microsoft engineers can't perceive.

At the PDC conference, he showed a chart that Windows users use for a wide variety of displays, including many VGA monitors. Previously, Microsoft engineers thought they had no need to support low-resolution displays.