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Are Windows 7 Testers Going Unheard?
nandemoari writes "Windows 7 beta testers are disputing whether or not Microsoft is taking notice of their feedback.
The dispute follows a blog post by Steven Sinofsky, the man in charge of engineering Windows 7. He notes that in one week in January Microsoft received data through Windows 7's automatic feedback system every 15 seconds.
According to Sinofsky, it's impossible to keep everyone happy. That's partly because there are only so many changes Microsoft can make to the system and still finish it, and partly because in many cases testers often have opposing views about a feature."
Newest changes coming in the RC http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/02/26/some-changes-since-beta.aspx
Libera te ex Inferis!
This is just standard practice for any chain of command. When I solicit feedback on documents I write at work, I often get conflicting opinions coming back. It's then my job to decide which opinions to accept in the final work. It is not my job to make everyone happy. That does not mean that I don't listen to the feedback I solicit.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
FTFA:
To date, we have fixes in the pipeline for nearly 2,000 bugs in Windows code (not in third party drivers or applications) that caused crashes or hangs.
Yet the trolling headline screams "ZOMG, M$ doesn't listen to users!!!"...
But wait, there's more!
To date, we have recorded over 10,000,000 device installations and over 75% of these were able to use drivers provided in box (that is no download necessary). The remaining devices were almost all served by downloading drivers from Windows Update and by direct links to the manufacturer's web site. We've recorded the usage of over 2.8M unique plug-and-play device identifiers.
2.8 million pieces of different hardware, and over 7.5 million installations had all drivers included, "almost all" could be downoaded easily. No matter what you think of Microsoft, that information is pretty much astonishing.
That's funny, I read this blog post from Microsoft today that detailed some of the changes made since the beta, all thanks to feedback from said beta.
It's quite a sizeable list and apparently only a small amount of the changes made so far. Considering nobody outside of Redmond (With the exception of a few select partners) is supposed to have access to anything other the beta, who's actually making the claim that the feedback is falling on deaf ears? Sounds to me like Microsoft IS actually listening for once.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
There is no reason to be stuck in Windows bondage land. You don't need it. Really, you don't.
Really? Because my multitude of games and windows-specific programs beg to differ. Of course, I don't strictly need those programs, but by that same standard I don't strictly need a computer at all.
I'm going to let you in on a secret, and it's not something you mention in company of Slashdot users and OSX nuts: people use what they like and are familiar with, and windows is good enough to get the job done. Vista is still miles ahead of Ubuntu in typical, every day usability, and this is coming from someone who likes to fire up the command line and edit iptables by hand. The gui in Ubuntu is still brittle and requires a lot of command line usage to use it like I want to use it. Windows, on the other hand, works a ton better without ever touching the command line. For a good server, I'll use Ubuntu. For a workable computer to play games on and browse the internet, I'll use windows.
This choice is reasonable, logical, and entirely dependent on opinion. If someone tells me I'm wrong, all they're doing is showing that they're being irrational. I like windows, and it's not because I'm masochistic, it's because it's just plain more usable for what I do.
Whether or not Windows 7 is streets ahead of OS X is debatable but I'm more interested in the second half of that point. OS X, at least the client version which is what I assume we're talking about, has no licensing scheme to speak of. You can install OS X on as many machines as you want from one disc and never have to make a phone call for an activation code or connect to Apple's servers for permission. I guess Apple is effectively selling a licence of OS X with every box sold you could argue their licensing is a giant dongle which doubles as a computer.
At any rate I think the reason OS X's licensing doesn't seem to have hampered it is because it barely has any when compared to the alternative from Microsoft.
and if you actually believe those statistics...
I remember at one point working at a large manufacturer and noting that our internal records showed more non-VM Linux machines in use than what supposedly existed for the entire globe.
Yeah. You run off and believe those numbers. Go for it.