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The post, called "The Windows 7 Team," was blogged sometime today. My RSS reader dates the post as 4 p.m. yesterday, even though it wasn't there a few hours ago. The timestamp on the blog site is 12 a.m. today, but the first comment isn't until 4:46 p.m. Whatever the time, it's one long inside-baseball kind of post, presumably written by Steven Sinofsky, senior veep of the Windows and Windows Live Engineering group. I'll take—and you should, too—insidery stuff over nothing.

My writing here is a bit snarky—simply can't resist—and will be so for the rest of this post. So, this is as good a place as any to praise the Engineering Windows 7, or E7, blog. It's good to see such an influential Microsoft executive as Steven Sinofsky blogging about Windows Vista's successor and using the blog as means of soliciting community, customer and even competitor feedback. The Windows Vista Team Blog, by comparison, is a marketing vehicle. So far, E7 is looking like a place for two-way conversation.

Now, returning to the regularly scheduled snarkiness--Steven sets the record straight, and I am just so pierced because of it:

To the surprise of both Jon and I a number of folks questioned the 'authenticity' of the post. A few even suggested that the posts are being 'ghost written' or that this blog is some sort of ploy. I am typing this directly in Windows Live Writer and hitting publish. This blog is the real deal—typos, mistakes, and all. There's no intermediary or vetting of the posts.

Since I was one of those people suggesting the PR "vetting of the posts," I'll take that as a well-deserved slap in the face. Oh, but it hurts. I really didn't need the slapping. Reading this paragraph convinced me there could be no ghost writer:

In general a feature team encompasses ownership of combination of architectural components and scenarios across Windows. 'Feature' is always a tricky word since some folks think of feature as one element in the user-interface and others think of the feature as a traditional architectural component (say TCP/IP). Our approach is to balance across scenarios and architecture such that we have the right level of end-to-end coverage and the right parts of the architecture.

PR folks gag over sentence structure like this. Damn, the paragraph reads like how I sometimes write. Mercy me.

By the way, the above paragraph is kind of important. Steven looks inside organizational areas where the Windows development team is working. He additionally observes:

Some have said that the Windows team is just too big and that it has reached a size that causes engineering problems. At the same time, I might point out that just looking at the comments there is a pretty significant demand for a broad set of features and changes to Windows. It takes a set of people to build Windows and it is a big project.

I've never heard that said. Have you? There have been loud complaints that Windows, meaning the code base, is too big. But the size of the team developing it—I dunno.

I'm pulling a long quote/alphabetical list from the post, because of what it reveals about Windows 7.

"Some of the main feature teams for Windows 7 include (alphabetically):

* Applets and Gadgets
* Assistance and Support Technologies
* Core User Experience
* Customer Engineering and Telemetry
* Deployment and Component Platform
* Desktop Graphics
* Devices and Media
* Devices and Storage
* Documents and Printing
* Engineering System and Tools
* File System
* Find and Organize
* Fundamentals
* Internet Explorer (including IE 8 down-level)
* International
* Kernel & VM
* Media Center
* Networking - Core
* Networking - Enterprise
* Networking - Wireless
* Security
* User Interface Platform
* Windows App Platform