Windows chief talks '7'

REDMOND, Wash.--Since taking over the Windows development reins from Jim Allchin, Steven Sinofsky has chosen to fall almost completely off the public radar.

It is not that he hasn't been busy getting Vista Service Pack 1 out the door and starting work on Windows 7. It's just that Sinofsky doesn't want to talk about products until they are well along in their development. Last year, Sinofsky penned a blog to his Windows unit co-workers, explaining his public silence and urging them to follow his lead.

"I know many folks think that this type of corporate 'clamp down' on disclosure is 'old school' and that in the age of corporate transparency we should be open all the time," Sinofsky wrote. "Corporations are not really transparent. Corporations are translucent. All organizations have things that are visible and things that are not."

Well, Sinofsky is breaking his public silence, slightly, to offer a few important details about 7 (he reiterated that it is coming by January 2010) and to explain why he is saying so little publicly.

In an exclusive interview with CNET News.com last week, Sinofsky talked about how the new version of Windows is designed to build on top of Vista's architectural changes without adding things like new driver models that can increase compatibility challenges. Below is the edited, but still rather lengthy transcript, of our conversation.

Q: In contrast to the pre-release publicity for earlier versions of Windows, we haven't heard a lot about Windows 7. Why?
Sinofsky: We're always super anxious as engineers to talk about the work that we're doing. But on the other hand we really take seriously our responsibility of being part of the overall Windows and PC ecosystem. We want to make sure that when we do share information, that the information we share is accurate and reliable, and that we have in place the mechanisms for feedback such that the feedback is really taken seriously with respect to our plans. The reactions that we've had to some of the lessons learned in Windows Vista are really playing into our strategy of getting together a great plan for Windows 7, and working with all the partners in the ecosystem in a very deliberate way, such that the end result is a very positive experience for all of us.

How do you balance that with trying to make sure that people see a future in Windows worth investing in?
Sinofsky: Well, that's a great question. I think that when you say people, there are many audiences. What we're trying to do is be deliberate with each of the many audiences that we have to deal with, and give them the information such that they do see and share the optimism that we share for the future of Windows and the future of PCs. So, it's really an audience-specific type of question.

A lot of our readers are pretty passionate about computers, and we haven't heard as many reasons from Microsoft as we hear from your competitors about why people should be excited about the direction the platform is going in.
Sinofsky: I would talk about an example of the way that we see this playing out, which is the way that we've talked about Internet Explorer 8. With Internet Explorer, of course, we have a lot of enthusiasts or very activist people who really want to learn about the future of our browsers, and we put together a plan that had some really significant investments, and we started to talk about them when we felt like we could demonstrate that those investments were going to really pay off, and that they were going to be actionable. So, you saw us do the planning, come through with working with all the partners that we work with and the influentials in a very deliberate, very one-on-one kind of way, and then we started talking about it broadly. We were ready with a beta, and we were ready for people to really act on the work we had done, and provided us the feedback that we're actually ready to absorb and ready to put into action.

So, for the enthusiasts, who are really excited about Windows, well, first, I share their enthusiasm. And second, we're really going to focus on making sure that when we talk about the product, that they're getting information that is really what we're doing for the product.

Do you think that makes it hard for Microsoft and its PC partners in the interim, as they're trying to sell consumers on Windows at a time where we're hearing a lot of ads speaking negatively about Vista, particularly from Apple? Is that a concern to you?
Sinofsky: There are a number of elements of the question, and certainly what I would say is when it comes to our partners, the people who make PCs, the people who make hardware, the people who build software, of course, our work with them is constant and ongoing. So, they're not surprised at all in the dimension of the things that we're doing; we're just working with them in a way that's specific to our different audiences. A great example of this is our enterprise customers, who do have multiyear plans. So with them, our salesforce is equipped to have this dialogue, to really talk about the future and the road map of our products. We think that for each of the audiences we have the kind of information that's required for them to act on it.

My question is, in the absence of information from Microsoft about where it's going, it seems like you have your competitor, in this case Apple, on the consumer front really defining Microsoft in the absence of Microsoft defining Windows out there in the marketplace.
Sinofsky: In a way that's a different question. That's sort of a question about how are we talking about our current products in the marketplace. I think that Apple has a very visible campaign, and we work with partners, and have a very different approach to how we're communicating our product. In a way, what I would say is Apple isn't really talking about where they're going, and that was the root of your question.

When you think about Windows, what does a good release schedule look like? We've certainly heard loudly from Steve Ballmer that he doesn't want to see a five-year time frame like there was between Windows XP and Vista. How often do people want a new Windows release, and what types of things should change from release to release?
Sinofsky: The way that I think of planning a release of Windows is--and Windows 7 will be no exception--we look at it as it's a major undertaking, and we're going to produce a major release of the product. Then what we do is we work on the plans, we get feedback from different partners at different times in the plans, and really the disclosure is when we start to talk about the information that's actionable and exciting about the product. The timing of it depends a lot on what we wanted to achieve, and you've certainly heard us, and we've been very clear, and will continue to say that the next release of Windows, Windows 7, is about three years after the general availability of Windows Vista, and we're committed to that, and we've signed up publicly to do that.

So, when Bill Gates was speaking in Miami, and said that Windows 7 was coming in the next year, was he referring to when the beta version would show up?
Sinofsky: What I think I want to say is what I just said, which is we said we'd be out there with a release of Windows 7 three years after the general availability of Windows Vista. We're excited; the investments that we have are really about producing a major and significant release at that time.

When you think about Windows, as the ecosystem and the installed base has grown so huge, it seems like the testing matrix and the list of possible interactions is so large that it's become very hard to change Windows. Do you think you can keep changing the operating system the way that you generally have, or does Windows reach a point where you want to basically take what Windows is today and run it in some sort of compatibility layer, and so you can really start fresh? I know that Apple a couple times in its history found itself wanting to do that.
Sinofsky: I look at it in a little bit of a different light. All of those IHVs (independent hardware vendors) and ISVs (independent software vendors)...I look at them as the key asset to the Windows and PC ecosystem. So, I don't at all look at them like a compatibility burden or challenge, to use the words that you used, but I look at it as well, that's the big asset that customers look to when they buy into a Windows PC. They say, hey, if I bought this printer five years ago, I want to keep using it, and I want to keep using it as part of my PC network. If I have this other piece of hardware, I want to keep using it. We do have to get better at the work that we've done, and, in fact, sometimes we make very, very substantial changes that are really multiyear bets.

A great example of that in Windows Vista is the work that we did on graphics. We did do exactly what you said would be very hard, which is we re-plumbed the graphics infrastructure for Windows. That has a huge number of benefits for the ecosystem at large. It means the drivers can be made more robust, they don't have to run in kernel mode and things like that. But we also didn't execute on that as flawlessly as I think we all would have liked collectively as the ecosystem. The team worked super hard with the partners in graphics to really do a great job, but the schedule challenges that we had, and the information disclosure weren't consistent with the realities of the project, which made it all a much trickier end point when we got to the general availability in January.