Steven Sinofsky: When we posted the new "inbox" desktop backgrouns, the reactions showed just how personal, personalization can be. Building on that theme of personalization (pun intended), we wanted to share some of the work we did on themes in Windows 7. We’ve shared data about customization in previous releases of Windows and this post builds on that. This is also an area where we know there is very broad spectrum of desires (needs) for personalization and we definitely had to balance the engineering and design efforts. I’ve received mail from many folks wanting to personalize (tweak) nearly every pixel on the screen—from border width, to title bar transparency percentage, to height of taskbar, to color/size/location of the close button (I’ve received each of these in email more than once). At the other end are customers who are enormously happy when they can easily change the background picture and color scheme, and many do. With Windows 7 we picked a group of settings that we believe represent the most satisfying settings to broadly personalize, and would also provide the most robust platform that maintains application compatibility, and made those easy to change. In addition we wanted to make it easy to package up those settings so you could save and share them. We think of this as the start of bringing robust personalization (and customization) to a broader set of customers. Katie Frigon, a program manager on the core user experience team, authored this post.