Author Archive for Gareth Williams

No doubt you’ve read other reviews of the second Windows Live Session by now. You’ve probably read about the features and insights into where in the development cycle the products are. The new mobile client looks very promising and the new mapping software has features to rival Google maps, but I doubt you’ve read much about the way the development focus seems to have shifted. Gone are the days of secrecy about the software!

Some of the people I spoke to are extremely enthusiastic about their jobs and their products. I spoke to one lady (sorry I forget your name!) about Windows Live Mail. Talking to her was very interesting, she was telling us about her favourite features and basically discussing how cool the software was. And as a user I’d have to agree with what she was saying. These people use these programs day in and day out. Not just for bug finding and testing purposes, but for pleasure!

I was also discussing what sort of plans there are with these Live sessions. The response seemed to be rather positive, Microsoft wants the user input and to meet people who are involved in the community surrounding their applications to give them very good feedback on features, what to include, what works and what doesn’t.

With the introduction of dev.live.com this shift is very visible, SDK’s being made available with support from forums is a very good sign that this trend will continue. With Microsoft developing the platforms and making interactions with those platforms easily accessible to developers, one can only imagine the add-ons and 3^rd party applications that will start springing up adding more colour and depth to the base platforms.

So it seems to be very exciting time at Microsoft, after talking to one of the developers, Koji Kato. I realised this. He at least and hopefully others in the messenger development team seem to be very geared towards the user experience and development of new and innovative features. Instead of the old “here’s a feature now go use it” attitude of the past we seem to be getting a much more “here’s a feature, how well do you think it works?”, which is what has been needed for a long time. I can only hope that Microsoft continues with this user based interaction and continues to develop in this way. We as users and developers can only benefit from it.