Once upon a time, in a land far away, there was a team of Microsoft employees. They operated in a black box, a silo of noncommunication. In order to learn what was in the new products they were developing you had to wait until they were released. There were no seeds, the prerelease software distributed to partners was codenamed with words like longhorn and the developers, if they spoke out of turn were publicly flogged with cat-o-nine-tails made of rusty old x86 hardware, known as flogware. But then something happened. Microsoft, to whatever degree, embraced a world of openness. The developers for various teams were suddenly encouraged to blog, speak…