Many Microsoft customers consider the company an 800-pound gorilla that tells them what they should want — and seldom listens. That perception, Microsoft says, is precisely why everyone on the development team of its Talisker embedded operating system now logs hours every week, chatting about the OS in news groups, checking out "bug reports" on a dedicated Web site and meeting with users face-to-face at "plugfests," where they discuss Talisker programming experiences.

"Since we began Talisker, our charter has been to get closer to our customers," said Todd Brix, a product planner for Windows embedded operating systems. Members of the development team, which has numbered between 30 and 50 people during its course, pride themselves on their willingness to listen, Microsoft executives say.

For development manager Larry Morris, for example, "listening" meant a lively — and fully public — exchange with an unhappy customer. A few months back, Morris engaged in an Internet debate with a beta customer of Talisker.

The customer wasn't happy with some of Talisker's features, and wasn't shy about stating his complaints.

To his chagrin, Morris learned that the debate, and the debater, simply wouldn't go away. Each day when Morris returned to the same news group, his adversary was there, armed with more ammunition. The two continued their exchange for more than a week, in full view of other Talisker beta customers who felt free to chime in about who was right.

"It can be a bit of an ego blow sometimes," Morris recalled. "But it comes down to this: We're trying to sell our product to these people, and sometimes they give us very valuable feedback."

Indeed, Morris said that Microsoft incorporated that customer's feedback in its second beta edition of Talisker, which will ultimately be called Windows CE.Net when it debuts as a full-fledged product later this year.

Give-and-take behavior

Such stories are now said to be commonplace on the Talisker project. For many in the developer community, that type of give-and-take isn't the mode of behavior normally associated with Microsoft or its employees.

Whether the new strategy will work is another matter. Up to now, Windows CE has barely made a dent in the embedded market. In a 2000 study of real-time operating system usage performed by CMP Media (EE Times' parent company), Windows CE 3.0 didn't even appear, garnering less than 1 percent of the responses. Worse, 99 percent of those polled weren't aware that Microsoft existed in the embedded RTOS space.

Such figures were in part why the software giant considered discarding Windows CE as recently as 18 months ago. "Back in May 2000, shortly after we released Windows Millennium, there were internal rumors that Windows CE was going to be shut down because we didn't need it any longer," said Tom Adams, general manager of the Windows CE operating-systems and tools platform group.

Indeed, many industry analysts believe that Windows CE may have been much closer to the chopping block than Microsoft executives admitted at the time. Still, the OS survived, and now stands on the verge of a splashy reintroduction.

As Microsoft executives plan that rollout, they are insisting that the new version is not only a changed product, but also reflects a new culture at Microsoft. Microsoft reorganized its embedded group in May 2000 and, in the process, made an effort to shed the company's reputation as an incommunicative giant.

Indeed, Talisker's developers hope their product will one day be swept up by the same sort of ground swell of enthusiasm that has engulfed Linux, the open-source OS. "One of the things that Linux has done well is to create a sense of community," Brix said. "Everyone participates, from the people who contribute the code to the people who use it. Over the last six to nine months, we've tried to emulate that sense of community."

Community model

That's why Talisker team members now spend time as Morris does, bantering with beta users in news groups, among other places. The team members include developers who write the code, testers who validate it and program managers who specify it. For them, the new modus operandi represents a stark departure from business as usual at Microsoft, but they say it's paying dividends.

"Historically, we didn't ever want our developers out in news groups," Morris said. "People would get ahold of our internal addresses and we'd get spammed, so we rarely used actual Microsoft addresses."

But as part of an effort to generate Linux-like excitement about CE, the company encouraged its Talisker team members to use their real names and e-mail addresses. Now, the engineers who wrote the kernel are accessible to anyone who has downloaded a Talisker Emulation Edition Preview or is working with a beta version. Beta users are given an ID when they sign up, and can use it to enter a news group and "talk" with Talisker team members.

"Now, I'm out there and they can see my name and title, and they don't hold anything back," Morris said. "They quite bluntly tell me what they want changed in the kernel or in a menu. Sometimes the feedback is harsh but they can still give valuable criticism."

To ensure that the developers truly address the users' issues, Microsoft has even assigned its own people to watch the news groups as spectators and look for any questions that go unanswered. If issues are left unresolved, the "spectators" prod the developers to respond.

For Microsoft, such techniques would not have been possible before, mainly because its embedded group didn't give out beta versions until now. With Talisker, however, the company recognized that it needed feedback.

Organized feedback

The beta program started in the spring, then moved to a second beta rollout this fall. Customers were allowed to download so-called "emulation editions," which didn't require the same target hardware, or they could order actual betas on DVDs or CDs. "We'd never before given thousands of companies the opportunity to look at, poke at and tear apart Windows CE," Brix said. "Before that, we had no organized way of getting feedback."

That was no small problem. In contrast to the experience in the desktop world, Microsoft engineers found that it often took months for embedded developers to provide valuable reaction.

"If we develop a new version of Windows XP or Excel, someone can download a beta from our Web site and have it up and running in 60 minutes," Brix said. "In contrast, it takes an embedded developer months to develop all the hardware-specific code and drivers to properly test [CE]."

This time around, Talisker's developers are confident they've collected enough responses. The emulation edition has had 14,000 downloads, and many of those users have engaged in a dialogue with the company, they say.

Microsoft is also letting users view the entire Talisker kernel. By signing a one-page "source access document," they're free to see all 100,000-plus lines, which they can comment on but not modify. The "shared-source" agreement, as Talisker team members call it, is modeled on the open-source nature of Linux. "We've been amazed at how quickly we've been able get dynamic engagement going around Windows CE," Brix said.

Real test

The real test awaits for Windows CE.Net, however. The OS' developers believe that if they've done their homework, the PDAs and other devices that use CE.Net will be better products. The same, they say, goes for industrial products that employ CE. "Over the past several years, we've learned that we can't go into large industries, such as automotive, and say, 'Here's your shell and here's your user interface,' " Adams said. "We know that we need to be more flexible."

Industry analysts agree that Microsoft has shown greater flexibility in its embedded approach, but don't know whether that will be enough by itself to make Windows CE more competitive. "They've definitely become more receptive to customer needs," said Daya Nadamuni, a senior analyst at Gartner Dataquest (San Jose, Calif.). "But other companies have tried to model their products after Linux, and they've found that it's difficult to force spontaneous enthusiasm on the market."

Microsoft developers, however, know that enthusiasm won't grow overnight, and they say they are prepared to be patient. "For us, it's all about design wins," said Brian King, development lead for Microsoft's DirectX multimedia team. "Ultimately, we'll gauge our performance by the market success of the devices that end up running CE."