This post is by Larry Osterman. Larry is one of the most “experienced” developers on the Windows team and has been at Microsoft since the mid 1980’s. There are only three other folks who have worked at Microsoft longer on the entire Windows team! Personally, I remember knowing about Larry when I started at Microsoft back in 1989—I remember he worked on “multimedia” (back when we used to host the Microsoft CD-ROM Conference) and he was one of those people that stood up and received a “5 Year” award from Bill Gates at the first company meeting I went to—that seemed amazing back then! For Windows 7, Larry is a developer on the Devices and Media team which is where we work on audio, video, bluetooth, and all sorts of cool features for connecting up devices to Windows.

Larry wrote this post without any prodding and given his experience on so many Windows releases these thoughts seemed really worthwhile in terms of sharing with folks. This post goes into “how” we work as a team, which for anyone part of a software team might prove pretty interesting. While this is compared and contrasted with Vista, everyone knows that there is no perfect way to do things and this is just a little well-informed perspective.