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Engineers Tell How Feedback Shaped Windows 7
An anonymous reader writes "Ars Technica took the time to talk to three members of the Windows 7 product development and planning team to find out how user feedback impacted the latest version of Windows. There's some market speak you'll have to wade through, but overall it gives a solid picture regarding the development of a Windows release."
"With Windows 7, Microsoft made sure that every edition of its operating system would run on low-end hardware. "One of the feedbacks that we got was how different the needs were for users on laptops compared to needs of users on desktops,""
/me boggles
Are you kidding me?! You're a company named Microsoft. You've been developing operating systems for 30 years. It took you this long to realize that different users have different needs, and that your OS should run on low-end hardware? And you only figured that out because of user feedback??
Over a decade ago, feedback for Microsoft software took place by filling out surveys on paper and floppy disks sent in to the company's headquarters. The ubiquity of the Internet has led to more feedback, faster.
And yet they could have used the Internet for feedback well more than a decade ago. Glad to see they've finally entered the mid-90s.
This guy's the limit!
XP requires TONS more ram than Window 3.1 and would be much slower on the same hardware. Do you not agree that XP is progression from 3.1?
It's Microsoft, they take a very long time to do anything right (or do anything at all). Just look at Internet Explorer, they have been working on it since 1994. 15 years later, we are still YET to receive a browser from Microsoft that is at least more than 20% web compliant. As a web developer this dearly pisses me off. How is that Firefox, Opera even Safari can get complaince in the 75%+ rating and not IE. Now that boggles my mind.
oh come on now. Since XP was released the random 'crashing' isn't prevalent any more.
If you have bad hardware or are overclocking, that is a different story, but also your own fault.
Lets be reasonable, this is like a wife of 30 years, bringing up stuff you did in high school!
From my observations, people are upgrading hardware at a slower and slower rate, so it is relevant. Most I know haven't done a major upgrade, outside of possibly adding ram or a changing video cards, in a few years and don't plan to anytime soon. Hardware has reached a "good enough" point.
I'm on a Athlon X2 with 4gb ram (maxed out). I have absolutely no intention of upgrading anytime soon.
Gone!
Windows 7 is another proof that enough marketing can make something good.
Windows 7, Windows 7, Windows 7, ...
I yet have to find someone who can show me what it brings me, over XP, that is worth paying 100+ EUR for.
in spite of the hardware problems, I have used vista and I hated it. Why do I have to re-learn everything because microsoft wants to try to sell more copies of an OS? It should make you life easier, not harder. And completely ignoring things like boot time, security, and backwards comparability (the things the Customer actually cares about), while bending over backwards to make sure DRM for hollywood is in the OS is really just shooting yourself in the foot.
It's Microsoft, they take a very long time to do anything right (or do anything at all). Just look at Internet Explorer, they have been working on it since 1994. 15 years later, we are still YET to receive a browser from Microsoft that is at least more than 20% web compliant..
Microsoft does have the technical resources to make IE score 100% on the Acid3 test. However, it is not in their best interests to do so. Here is a quote from Bill Gates (taken from wikiquotes) which demonstrates Microsoft's business strategy.
One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company. We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities.
This is the attitude that Microsoft is developing software with. Just look at the number of businesses that are stuck with IE6 because of some legacy ActiveX application. Microsoft's strategy is working very well for them and I don't see them ever changing.
Can I just have a 64-bit windows operating system that will keep up with the latest graphics drivers. And bring back classic XP Window's Explorer... I hate Vista's Explorer with a passion. If you change something, make a classic version!
I don't want to sound like a broken record here, but one of the things I truly love about OSS development is how transparent development is. I can easily contact the developers. I can submit bugs.
I have tons of usability gripes with Windows. I've never felt like I could submit feedback to Microsoft that might be seen and looked at.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
What's your point? That mojave marketing stunt didn't address Vista's actual problems.
The Mojave ad campaign came out a few months after the February 2008 release of Windows Vista Service Pack 1, which did address technical problems with Windows Vista.
...that came from this feedback, that makes businesses using XP want to switch? We all know why NOBODY switched to Vista, so why would anyone switch to win7?
Please, I'm not asking why should NOT switch, we all know that answer. But someone please explain why we SHOULD move to win7 !
Those who can, do.
And all they had to do to head that off was give away their 8 year old OS. No major skin off Microsoft's back, and they maintain lock-in. There probably wasn't even a chair thrown.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Remember MS has never concerned themselves with consumers; for the most part consumers are not their customers. Companies were their customers for businesses. On the consumer side, OEMs are their customers. Either way, MS never dealt as much with direct consumer support and interaction. If there were support issues, companies' IT departments took care of their business users and OEMs handled the consumers. With Vista, this came back to hurt them as OEMs could simply blame MS on the whole fiasco especially when consumers could downgrade to XP and see a significant performance and stability improvements.
MS also gambled that minimum hardware would advance more than their new OS would bog it down. With every release, MS would redefine what "minimum" hardware requirements meant. With Win95 and 98, minimum meant Windows may be slower if the user was doing processor intensive. More memory would definitely fix it. With XP, "minimum" meant that Windows would be slower especially if the user was doing processor intensive. More memory would fix most things. By the time of Vista, minimum meant you could load Windows onto the machine. Good luck on actually running anything but the OS. More memory might fix it, but CPU and video card upgrades were more likely necessary which meant it would be cheaper for the user to buy a new computer or downgrade to XP rather than upgrade their computer to actually use Vista.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I'm actually not sure how this got to +4 funny. Maybe +5 interesting? I digress. I've been a fan of Win2k for a long time, I used it for just about everything from gaming to my work up until XP64 and had a stable driver set. Does Win7 have that nifty feel of Win2k? Yes actually it does. Even on lower end hardware it's decently snappy, and runs well.
Issues? The biggest I've found is it's ability to lose connection to the internet on reboots. Meaning you need to disable and reenable your network card which fixes it. Sadly no new drivers for my card, but otherwise works fine. I consider that a 2 on my 1-10(10 being worst) scale of crap. Otherwise, I'm quite happy. My XP64 machine has been up and running for a bit more than 460 days now without a reboot. I expect that Win7 will beat that easily.
Om, nomnomnom...
Because for a while (96-98) there weren't concrete standards for DOM interaction beyond document.clear/write/close .. Once the standards were firmed up, things headed in that direction and IE5 was pretty compliant for its' time compared to the alternatives. At that time Opera was pretty much following IE's lead, and Netscape 4.x was a nightmare by comparison. This is even without use of proprietary ActiveX plugins or Java.
Microsoft created an XML interface that eventually became the XmlHttpRequest we all know and love. MS's DOM interactions in IE4 shaped the direction of the W3C DOM specification we have now. It's easy to gripe about MS from today's standards, but when IE4-5 came out it was well ahead of the competition.
This is why your comments are trollish. You could say that from 2003-2007 there was a huge level of disparity between the development of IE and where web based standards have come. And that you have large issues with MS because of this. From 1997-2002 IE was pretty much the best option.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
I'll echo the above to a large extent. Here's my take on UAC, as compared to sudo.
First the similarities: they function in much the same way.They have similar (though not completely overlapping) goals, and they protect more or less the same stuff. Back when I first switched to Vista (about six months after it came out), there was still a lot of flap going on about UAC. I decided to keep a log of every UAC prompt I received, and did so for a month. I don't have it handy, but IIRC here is roughly how it came out. There were bascially three reasons I got prompted: (1) I was making an expected administrative change that would have required root on Linux (most of them), (2) there was a bit of the UI that was designed poorly, or (3) I was first logging on and this hardware monitoring piece of software was starting. The second category is the most interesting; almost all (or maybe all) of these were because I wanted to change my environment variables. Even though I was just changing my user's variables the dialog where you do that is also where you change system-wide environment variables; the fact that you could do the latter mean you needed elevation. (Win 7 fixes this dialog so you don't need elevation to change your own environment.) In addition, while I didn't get it for this reason, some people got UAC prompts for things like start menu and desktop changes. The desktop thing wouldn't happen on Linux because neither KDE nor Gnome have the idea off a global "all users" desktop in addition to the per-user one. The changes that caused these UAC prompts were because the change had to affect the all users desktop. I'm not sure how Gnome and KDE store the equivalent of the start menu soo I'm not sure hoow sudo would behave there.
Now the differencees:
1. UAC behaves more like 'su' than sudo. You need the password of the admin user, not your own. For enterprise users, this could be a big deal. For a home user, I doubt it matters much. For a single-user computer, it doesn't really matter in the slightest.
2. UAC doesn't cache its permission. If you need to elevate twice in a row, you have to explicitly elevate twice. At least on a typical desktop configuration, gksudo will cache its permission for a couple minutes. This is the main respect in which, IMO, UAC is more annoying. That said, this rarely happened in my month of UAC logging.
3. UAC is on-demand: a running program can ask for elevation. This is in contrast to sudo, where you need to start with said user's rights. This isn't very different from the end user's perspective as compared to stuff like GkSudo, but is pretty nice as compared to running sudo from the command line, where at least I often found myself going "oops, I needed to start that as root."
4. Even admin users need to elevate, but root doesn't need to sudo. A little annoying if you're doing a loot of admin stuff. Then again, you only need to click 'yes' as opposed to type your password, so it's not too bad. This is important for Windows users where most people are an admin anyway (and hence sudo as-such wouldn't do anything). Speaks more about the Windows architecture and programs than UAC in that respect. (Win 7 changes this; admin users don't have to explicitly elevate as much. Icons with the UAC logo elevate without a prompt. Programs that just want elevation, like installers, still cause a prompt.)
5. UAC checks the program's digital signature, and displays either the confirmed source or a warning about a missing signature; sudo doesn't do any of that. In theory this is a nice win on UAC's part, but in practice I doubt it matters much. A lot of programs (esp. OSS apps) aren't signed, so the presence of that warning usually isn't surprising so I just click through anyway, and (1) you need to a lot of thee time and (2) I even know all about what it's talking about it.
All Microsoft did in 7 is reduce the security, since many users will blindly click through whatever is shown anyways, and power users turn it off.
I don't buy this stat
If you have gone 460 days without a reboot, it's because you haven't been applying security updates. Your system is highly vulnerable, and you are a joke as a system administrator.
Turn in your geek card NOW.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.