Microsoft Missed Real Feedback on Whidbey

Mark Cligget from Microsoft explains about CP whidbey cycle and CP goals. Very good and reasonable post. He is right in many points. From my experience on interaction with whidbey blogosphere I can say that I have a feeling that Microsoft fails in identifying what is black and white in the feedbacks that they get. May be they are not too much experienced in blogging area as they should be. For example many Microsoft developers that play important roles in development don't own a blog and if they do - one can find less than 5 posts on 70% of them (in a year). I mean that Microsoft misses real feedback on whidbey from people that earned their respect online and chooses random mails and posts from mostly anonymous people, that I suspect didn't install whidbey at all. As you can see Mark does not give names/links on feedbacks provided. Names, man, give me names ! And this is not the first time I can see this "we accept feedback from many people", "many of our customers say", etc.

CPs are definitely a good thing. May be incremental updates are better but if you make so many changes from build to build I can reinstall it. So what ? It has so many changes vs. .NET 1.1 that I have a feeling that many people which have online influence missed the opportunity to provide the feedback on so many issues. BTW, Longhorn is covered much better and online "prime time" belongs to it. It's not right of course. Whidbey should come before Longhorn. Yeah, and what about Yukon previews ?

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The comment about anonymity is interesting. In this case (the comments from the vb customers) I didn't feel it was appropriate to share their names - I grabbed their comments out of a private piece of email that someone in the vb team forwarded me.

That said, I agree with you that as we do it today, there is too much "opaqueness" where info gets routed in to our teams and the public only sees what we choose to share. For customer bugs and suggestions in particular, we're not too far away from having a tool where all feedback and all ms responses/status will be public. It would be a huge positive to have respected online experts weigh in on these issues.

I don't understand the point about Longhorn being covered much better - what are you thinking of in particular? What would you like us to do that we're not doing?