by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2008/08/15 03:31 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2008/08/15/8869007.aspx
So there is a cool new blog out there, the Engineering Windows 7 blog. Coming principally from Steven Sinofsky and Jon DeVaan, it has a stated goal that is fairly impressive, put in the Welcome blog:
Beginning with this post together we are going to start looking forward towards the “Windows 7” project. We know there are tons of questions about the specifics of the project and strong desire to know what’s in store for the next major release of Windows. Believe us, we are just as excited to start talking about the release. Over the past 18 months since Windows Vista’s broad availability, the team has been hard at work creating the next Windows product.
The audience of enthusiasts, bloggers, and those that are the most passionate about Windows represent the folks we are dedicating this blog to. 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.
Although to be honest this is not why I am writing about the E7 blog.
I am writing about it for a different reason, one that the Welcome blog discusses close to the end:
Please note the availability of this blog in several other languages via the links on the nav pane. These posts are also created by members of our development team and we welcome dialog on these sites as well. We will continue to expand the list in other languages based on feedback.
Those beginning links over on the right side are:
which is interesting for several reasons, including the problems there will be with scalability, problems with the names/languages (anyone notice what I'm talking about?), and the fact that there is no way to move from a specific post in one language to another language, thus:
with no one (yet) translating the second post with the guidelines on comments, an issue which adds a whole bunch of unique challenges when you have multiple languages handled not by a localization team but by individuals on the development team.
Now this actually highlights some of the real challenges one hits when an eager jump is made into this space, something I previously talked about in relation to Joel Spolsky in Localisation via Wiki? and which are quite resolved in efforts like Wikipedia....
I am sure that over time as perhaps the efforts here mature further, I can highlight updates going forward. It is an exciting space, one where the current approach kind of highlights the real, grass-roots nature of the entire blog, if you think about it! :-)
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# John Cowan on 15 Aug 2008 10:43 AM:
Ghordjazz.
Every country of course speaks just one language.
# Michael S. Kaplan on 15 Aug 2008 3:52 PM:
Yep, that is one of the several limitations here. Some (though not all) of the others might require native speakers....