Microsoft Starts Blog for Windows 8 Information Exchange

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As Microsoft prepares to provide developers, customers, and OEMs more details about Windows 8 at its upcoming Build conference next Month, the head of the project has started a new blog to try to streamline communications among the various concerned communities.

Steven Sinofsky, president of Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) Windows and Windows Live Division, inaugurated what the company has dubbed the “Building Windows 8” — AKA “B8” — blog late Monday.

“This blog is an important part of developing Windows 8, as was our blog for Windows 7. Blogging allows us to have a two-way dialog with you about design choices, real-world data and usage, and new opportunities that are part of Windows 8,” Sinofsky said in his inaugural post to the new blog.

The company’s blog for Windows 7 became an important conduit for relaying information between Microsoft and developers, users, and PC makers prior to that version’s launch in late October 2009.

For instance, the Engineering Windows 7 blog provided information, such as when Windows 7 would reach the “release candidate,” or RC, stage of development.

One of the points that Sinofsky clearly wanted to get across early on in his first post to B8 is that, despite the fact that Windows 8 will be the first release of Windows to support processors other than x86 architectures — notably ARM Holdings’ so-called system-on-a-chip (SoC) CPUs — it will be backwards compatible with the copies of Windows 7 already in use worldwide.

“It is also important to know that we’re 100 percent committed to running the software and supporting the hardware that is compatible with over 400 million Windows 7 licenses already sold and all the Windows 7 yet to be sold,” Sinofsky said.

Microsoft is widely expected to provide attendees at its Build conference in mid-September in Anaheim with technology preview code for developers and users to try out prior to the beginning of the public beta test of Windows 8, expected to occur around the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in early January.

Sinofsky previously showed off Windows 8’s proposed new user interface at the All Things Digitalconference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., in early June.

“Our top priority is the responsibility we feel to our customers and partners, to make sure we’re not stressing priorities, churning resource allocations, or causing strategic confusion among the tens of thousands of you who care deeply and have much invested in the evolution of Windows,” Sinofsky said in his opening B8 post.

Stuart J. Johnston is a contributing editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @stuartj1000.