About a year ago, I put out in the Zune forums a question. What if we tried to develop a feature "out in the open?" Typically we do our development behind closed doors, and we do this for a number of reasons: competitive advantage, because things ALWAYS change mid-cycle and if we promised one thing in November, what we delivered in April would likely be totally different, and to get the most out of the marketing splash when the time does come. However, to try to be more "social"...

Before I worked on Zune, I worked on Windows Media Center - specifically, on TV signal setup and recording. Media Center has a really active community (not run by Microsoft) called The Green Button , and working with those folks over there, we started a forum called "Ask Jessica," where Media Center users could ask me questions about TV features. One of my fave things about working at Microsoft is being able to move around the company to different projects. When I was ready to move on from Media...