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Windows 7 Beta Released To Public After Delay

Posted by timothy on from the join-the-queue-or-ubuntu dept.

Z80xxc! writes "The Windows 7 Beta release is now available for download by the general public, in 32-bit and 64-bit flavors. Microsoft had previously announced availability around 3 PM PST on Friday, but after unexpected numbers of people proved to be interested in the download, had to postpone it to add more servers."

1 of 848 comments (clear)

  1. Re:two license keys by JonTurner · · Score: 1, Troll

    Perhaps they are distributing the same five keys to 2.5 million people?

    But the more interesting part of this situation is the question "why are they doing this?" I think they originally meant to grant individual keys but their infrastructure (webservers, keygen systems, database, fileservers, ??) couldn't keep up. So they basically started serving a cached set of ten static HTML pages to incoming requests.

    Even more troublesome, their engineering/support groups couldn't respond quickly enough to solve the issues so they kept pushing the "release" date/time back further and further before apparently giving up and going with the cached keys.

    This is nothing short of a debacle -- a failure in planning and execution and a breakdown in communication, probably internally, but certainly to the userbase.

    I wonder how many potential customers they just lost from this experience? How many folks will decide "I'm tired of this nonsense" and go buy a Mac?

    I feel bad for the chairs in Steve Balmer's office -- they're in for a beating.