gHacks go to Microsoft
As a new Windows MVP I'll be having my first meetings next week with Microsoft at their UK head office in Reading. It's going to be very interesting as it’s my first official visit to the company and, more importantly, a meeting that’s been requested by them rather than me.
I’ll be meeting with the Windows and the Windows Phone teams and touring their “Technology Centre†with all their cutting-edge prototypes, which I’m certain will be extremely interesting, and will take far longer for me to get round than the time they’ve got pencilled in for it!
I thought it only fair and reasonable to throw the doors open to you, the fantastic readers at gHacks to get out there any and all questions you’d like me to ask when I’m there. You might want to know about legacy support, Windows 8, Windows Phone sales projections or the future of Kinect. I’ll also be taking my camera to document all the cool stuff I expect to find (and will hopefully get to play with) in the technology centre.
So feel free to submit all your questions below in the comments, I’ll be subscribing and will keep them all safe in my email. No question is too silly, believe me I’ll a fair few myself, and I’ll try and get any many in as I can during my meetings there or afterwards by email.
I'll also be tweeting live from Microsoft on the experience and what I see and find out. You can follow these tweets live on Wednesday 20th April from 11am (UK BST), 3am (PST) by following me here.
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I’m becoming increasingly frustrated with the lack of vertical space available (especially on netbooks and notebook computers) since the shift to 16:9 widescreen displays.
Some OSs have noticed this trend too. For example, Ubuntu Linux has developed the desktop interface Unity to address this issue.
Does Microsoft have plans to address this issue at all in Windows 8? I believe there is a lot of vertical space wasted in the current Windows 7 design.
When is Microsoft going to come clean and apologise for Vista ?
Why aren’t useful and cool features form Office for Mac 2008 integrated into Office 2010?
When will we be able to create a multi-column multi-image document without floating images skipping around and attacking us?
Ask to see more of what their “touch” interface will look like in Win 8 for tablets.
Also, will Microsoft create their own hardware for a tablet? Maybe let the xBox team tackle that one…..I’m no xbox fanboy but they did create a pretty good piece of hardware for gaming, the PS3 is still better :-p
Why you choose to use Ribbon UI in Explorer?
Mike they will probably ask you to sign a NDA before they tell you anything ;)
You could ask them
> about XP to 7 Upgrade options
> Why Vista was really excluded from IE10
> If the new OS will be named Windows 8
> When they plan to release it
> If they’d like to sponsor a giveaway on Ghacks or W7n
Don’t think they’ll let you use your camera inside the technology centre!
Will Windows 8 support VB6 programs?
I second this.
Any chance they’ll start going back to the old DOS days where programs were confined to their own directories? This would make moving to a new computer easy AND will speed up the computer since it would get rid of the registry bloat. Let’s go back to INI files and put the OS on a ROM chip. Sounds like they are doing something like this with the USB OS option.
:) How I miss .ini files!!!
Will Microsoft go to dell?