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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."
I suspect there is a big difference between unheard and ignored!
Maybe. But I do think that customer feedback is crucial to Microsoft at this point. And I think they know that. They really can't afford for Windows 7 to get the same public backlash that Vista got.
My blog
Yeah I'm not really sure what the problem here is. I imagine that there are more beta testers then coders, MS has to evaluate the flood of info coming in, prioritize everything, and get back to it. MS's job isn't to respond to every single Beta Tester with a personalized "ok we fixed your problem now", their job is to get the project done.
Frankly EVERY SINGLE product I've seen that has a public beta has these EXACT SAME complaints from the public.
Most of the comments here just sounds like a bunch of whining to me.
And if you're an enterprise user with 1000's of computers and 1000's of users all needign to share data and collaborate? Well then there's Active Directory. God knows I'm not a Microsoft apologeist but I haven't seen anything that even comes close to the power and ease of use there is in Windows Server and Active Directory.
I may agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to face the consequences of saying it.
I have converted 3 people to *nix since October. All three came from the 'used Xp just fine, but what is this?' crowd, right after getting a new PC with Vista pre-installed. All three have commented on how easy their computers are to use now, and wished they had heard of this *nix thing years ago.
What exactly did these people find so hard about Vista? Seriously?
I mean if they could 'easily' handle switching Office programs, switching email programs, switching browsers, switching to any of linuxes file explorers, switching to Gnome or KDE windowing conventions, using amarok instead of itunes or windows media player, learning the new terminology, figuring out Kopete or Pidgin instead of MSN, got their wifi going, set up their own printers, figured out how to get their all in one scanner to ocr something, shared some files over the network with Samba...
but what... you expect me to beleive they were hopelessly befuddled by Vista's "Network and Sharing Center" or that that "Add/Remove Programs" is now "Programs and Features"... or that when they install something they have to click 'Allow'.
Give me a break.
The only rational explanation I can think of is one of expectations. They expected Vista to be identical so the slightest change is reported as 'confusing and hard' and they expected Linux to be incomprehensibly different so the slightest familiarity is 'surprisingly easy and welcome'.
But in 'absolute' terms anyone willing to take the effort to poke around in a Linux distro to figure things out will cope just fine in Vista with the same mindset.