A few days before joining Windows7News I wrote on my own site that I had been informed by a reliable source that the cause of the recent split of the Windows build trees, the release candidate tree and release to manufacturing tree, was the fact that an interface change was coming.
I was told that this wouldn’t involve any changes to functionality, it would merely be a new ‘skin’ to change the look and feel.
Now I have no proof one way or the other, just the word of a reliable source. I was looking back through my previous emails today with Microsoft Senior Vice President for Windows etc. fella Steven Sinofsky when I came across an email I had sent him about the taskbar.
I was heavily critcising it’s look and feel, it’s been one of my major bug bears since the technical beta began. His reply to me didn’t make a lot of sense at the time, and I could be reading too much into it now. He simply said…
Give it some time.
Does this mean anything? Did he know a change was coming back then? The email was sent back in January so they would certainly have been working on such a thing by then.Â
Certainly all the feedback technical testers were getting through the connect site said either “by design” or “won’t fix”, Microsoft’s way of saying they weren’t interested as they’d already locked that functionality down. If they were planning a new look and feel, these answers would be consistent with this.
This may turn out to be nothing, however I thought such a potentially interesting tid-bit might turn out to be a clue. So if it pans out, remember you read it first on Windows7News.
