July 19, 2005

help me, longhorn.

So some tidbits of news about Longhorn are making their way out of Microsoft.  Included in Mary Jo Foley’s writeup, amongst the (as yet unproven and untestable) claims of faster boot times, faster resume from suspend times and easier install was this little nugget…

Longhorn will allow users to customize the help system with their own annotations.

Now that’s interesting.  I wouldn’t put it past the new and improved ‘soft to enable enterprises to aggregate these annotations for wider use, or to allow users to opt-in to have their annotations shared back to the mother ship as a feedback mechanism.  The spam problem would be a bit problematic without either central or community-based editorial control, but one could imagine having the help system auto-subscribe to useful annotations from other Windows users that match your skill level.