The list keeps getting shorter, we’re under 70 blockers on the front end now! Thanks to everyone who has stepped into the mix this cycle, we wouldn’t have come this far this fast without your help. Things still look to be on target for a September release, barring late-breaking issues, as long as we stay focused on the present. Its been a tough slog at times, from the Places delay, to major arch work for Search and Spellcheck, to the long death march known as triage, but we’re close now. I hope everyone who has been involved is proud of what we’ve achieved to date, since we set a Q3 target in late 2005, and we’re still on Q3 as a target.

In the last year, we’ve matured as an organization, and we have done a lot to eliminate some of our more traditional tensions (trunk vs. branch work, front end vs. back end). We have changed our culture to set achievable targets, and hit them fairly consistently. There was a running joke when I came here that the safest time to plan a vacation was the projected release date, but we’ve turned that around. Its not a trivial task to ship on time, or to get everyone on board with a size to fit mentality, but we seem to have done that for the most part. I think our continued success will depend on continuing that maturation process.