Brad Abrams - Do you use feedback from blogs to design the CLR?

I think the question is a bit unfair. It's abit like asking someone if they like world peace. You can't really say "no".

Anyway, I'm curious about to what extent it matters WHO makes the suggestions. If two guys working at Intel says X, and 2000 home users say it's a horrible idea - who do you listen to? What I'm basicly getting at is how much "money talks", and how much is the technical merit is worth. I know this question is equally unfair and hard to answer.

I like watching these clips from the interview with  Brad. It looks to me like he really enjoy his work and got passion for the technology. I find that inspiring.

This change of mentality he talk about is a move in the right direction. I just hope technical journalists out there don't destroy this Glasnost. They have a tendency to blow even the slightest bit of hint of a rumour into war size headlines.

/Lars.

What I appreciate the most is that they even consider looking at blogs or comments from clients/developers. This in of itself is a major step in the right direction. I know they spin stories about how they always listen to us, but how much of that do I really believe.

It just seems from my experience that when I have a project and I have a "committee" that leads the direction of this project, the end-users aren't considered. The end-user opinion gets lost because the "committee" feels it knows what is best for the end-user and worse they think they know what the end-user wants.

This interview and others makes me feel better about MSFT willingness to jump into the "community waters" a little bit. This is a good thing.

clint_hill wrote:

What I appreciate the most is that they even consider looking at blogs or comments from clients/developers.

Good point!

/Lars.

Thanks folks!

For general feedback on early alphas and betas, it is fair to say that the degree of importance we place on the feedback is directly proportional to the amount of investment (time, resources, etc) customers\partners have made in that technology.  We typically have a small handful of customers and partners that betting big with us very early… there feedback maters a lot to us, because we really want them to be successful.  Notice these folks don’t have to be big players in their space, quite the opposite sometimes.  In V1, we worked with some compiler vendors very early on and took tons of feedback from them for exactly this reason.  Ditto with ASP.NET, there are a small number of websites that did “go-live” on our beta bits – you better believe we listen closely to them.  The cycle continues now with Longhorn. 

 

But specific to blogs,  it is a bit of a different story…  By the nature of the technology, the pedigree of the commentors on my blog is much less important than the quality of their comments.  But people do build up credibility over time… For example Chris Brumme and I have talked about a few of the frequent posters to our blogs and have found a number in common that have earned a fair amount of respect… But there can easily be anyone that is demonstrating insight and general “smarts” in their space… you don’t have to be a company betting big on our latest technology to be heard.