Look Into the Future of VS.NET (Continued)
Changing the Culture
PM: You gave the keynote address at VSLive! San Francisco this morning, which marks the one-year anniversary of the launch of Visual Studio .NET. It's been a pretty big year for the VS.NET team, not to mention developers who use Microsoft's programming tools. Take us back, to just before the launch. What were you most proud of as you prepared to ship VS.NET?
ER: I was extremely proud of the team that we assembled to create the product. The team is obsessed with enabling the developer, with helping the developer community achieve its dreams. These folks delivered on an on an incredibly ambitious plan.
I was also proud of the way we viewed the community as an extension of the team, in the way we've changed the culture…
PM: Changed the culture how?
ER: Changed the culture of how we interact with the community in terms of community participation, user groups, newsgroups, our Web sites, how we make our content available to others to syndicate, and how we crosslink with others in the community. I think programs like VSIP and the .NET Code Wise Community provide tremendous value to developers. We're involved with the community, not dictating to it from on high.
PM: What would you do differently if you were to relaunch/rebuild the tool in light of what you've learned over the last year? What, if any part of that, is reflected in the upcoming Everett or Yukon versions of VS.NET?
ER: One thing that has surprised me is the pace of adoption. When you go through a big platform shift, be it from DOS to GUI or from 16- to 32-bit, you never know how well or how quickly the platform will ramp. When we were delivering .NET (when ASP.NET was in beta), we came up with something called the Go Live license. We thought that maybe 20 customers would want to Go Live with their solutions before we actually shipped. It turned out that thousands asked to Go Live now because the .NET technology was leaps and bounds ahead of anything they were using. There was incredible pent-up demand to move to these kinds of solutions.
If we had recognized the demand better, we would probably have put more resources into helping our customers adopt the technology faster, and leveraged the pent-up demand to get an even faster shot out of the gate. We are happy with the pace of adoption now, but it would have been a good idea to have been even more aggressive in this technology in the hands of our customers.
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