My team for Windows 8
Earlier this week Steven Sinofsky kicked off the Building Windows 8 blog, the successor to the excellent (in my opinion) Engineering Windows 7 blog, which was often referred to as the “E7” blog. When the E7 blog kicked off, you may recall that Steven introduced the team, including a list of the names chosen by each feature team across the division. I soon followed up with a post about the feature team I worked on at the time.
The new “B8” blog is making this a tradition with a post titled Introducing the Team, and I decided I should do the same. So before I say any more, any guesses about which team from the list is mine?
If you guessed “Search, View, and Command” then you guessed right!
You’re also right if you guessed that this is an evolution of the Find & Organize team from Windows 7. However, the new is far from a simple rebranding of the old. In fact, I would estimate that only about half of our team’s roster can be traced back to F&O. Along the same lines, our charter has evolved as well. More about that another day 🙂
Stay tuned for the B8 blog to learn more about our team and the work we’re doing. You can follow @BuildWindows8 on Twitter to get notified about the latest updates.
MS trivia: Our team is commonly abbreviated as “SVC,” which has on occasion caused some confusion. That’s because the SVC abbreviation has long been used to refer to the Silicon Valley Campus down in Mountain View, CA. Our team’s offices are in Redmond, WA.
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Ok, I hoped you fixed the broken Search from Vista/7. I’ve never used such an unable software which consume a lot of power and finds nothing.
1 example: If I have the indexer service running and I type something in the startmenu search nothing happens for 3-4 seconds. If I turn indexing off, the results show immediately. Shouldn’t this be completely the opposite?
I posted some speculation on this on another site when the list of teams was originally posted:
“To me the most interesting team is Search, View and Command. It seems to have replaced the Find and Organize (aka Windows Explorer/Start Menu search box, aka Paolo’s old team) group from Windows 7, and suggests they’re going for a major revamp of those features (or at least they were back when they named the team), possibly (my speculation) focusing on integration with Bing and other external search providers (Search), displaying and organizing search results from disparate sources in a visually ordered and attractive way (View), and extending the search interface to allow you to “take action” while also supporting speech recognition (Command) – something that we really haven’t seen many hints of yet in the context of Windows, either in the leaked builds or in official/leaked info, though Ballmer and others have recently been talking up related concepts in a vague general way.
btw, [Mary Jo Foley] speculates this and In Control of Your PC could be Kinect related – I doubt it – I doubt there will be much/any focus on Kinect integration this time around, as I doubt the Windows group would have wanted to make a big bet on an unproven (back in 2009-10 when Win8 was being designed) risky tech from another division. (although the speech features may be promoted as somehow “Kinect based” because they work great with the Kinect microphones, but really they’re extensions of the existing Windows speech features). It’s more likely In Control of Your PC is the team tasked with (trying to) combat the perception among ordinary users that they’re not in control of their PC, what with third-party crapware putting a zillion toolbars on their browsers that they have no idea how to get rid of, etc. Features like app sandboxing, IE9’s warnings about addons bogging things down (maybe a sign of similar features coming e.g. in the file explorer), and System Reset are meant to help fight this.”
I somehow doubt you can comment on any of this right now, but once it’s finally revealed it’ll be interesting to see how much my speculation resembles the reality …