I thought I would throw a quick link up for the new, officially sanctioned Windows 7 blog run by Windows Engineering chief Steven Sinofsky and Windows Core OS Division head Jon DeVaan. The blog joins the unsanctioned (but also uninformative) Shipping 7 blog which is purported to be authored by someone on the next generation Windows project and which has served as the avenue for much of the very little publicly known information about the OS.

When I say "also uninformative" you can take that to mean that I am of the same opinion as Mary Jo Foley regarding the new blog: it's likely to be something of a Potemkin village, and not a meaningful source of useful information to CIOs. We'll have to wait for some other engineer lower down the rungs to start up a guerilla blog and tell us what's really going on, without the spin.

Nonetheless, this is exactly what I think Microsoft should be doing at this juncture, instead of wasting, say, $300 million on a Vista marketing campaign. Get out there and drum up some excitement about Windows 7, take the temperature of the community (blogs are excellent for this purpose), and look forward, not backward.