An excerpt:

With this blog we're opening up a two-way discussion about how we are making Windows 7. Windows has all the challenges of every large scale software project — picking features, designing them, developing them, and delivering them with high quality. Windows has an added challenge of doing so for an extraordinarily diverse set of customers. As a team and as individuals on the team we continue to be humbled by this responsibility.

We strongly believe that success for Windows 7 includes an open and honest, and two-way, discussion about how we balance all of these interests and deliver software on the scale of Windows. We promise and will deliver such a dialog with this blog.

The blog encourages open discussion, but Microsoft haters will have to get their facts straight or risk getting slapped down by the hard-core Windows set.

Check out this exchange -- the third and fourth comments submitted. First the dig:

# re: Welcome to Engineering Windows 7 I have heard from some very inside sources that Windows 7 is more of the same. How about starting with updating core components like making the system what it was supposed to be in Vista. WinFS, WCF, WPF all at the core.

We're stuck with windows 3.1 under the covers still. Would love to see it trimmed down and revamped. Apple reinvented itself with OS X and Microsoft better do the same here soon.

Then the response, from "Vista Lover":

Thursday, August 14, 2008 3:02 PM by Kosher # re: Welcome to Engineering Windows 7 Kosher, you are wrong, Vista (and XP and W2k and all of the NT line) are NOT based on Windows 3.1 or DOS, please get your facts correct before telling someone else how to do their job. Second, the NT line is the reinvention of Windows that OS X is to Mac OS classic. Just because MS did it 7 years before Apple and did it without having to emulate the lesser OS doesn't make it not so.

Anyways, I'm happy this blog is up and expect to have lots of fun here. I trust it will be very educational, even to those who don't wish to be educated.