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."

Comments

We Listened!

[db32]

We heard what you wanted and were sure to avoid those things at all costs. In the event that we could not avoid a given feature we made it practically impossible to use, moved the functionality to a new hidden location, or barrage you with popups and wizards to ensure you really want to use it.

Re:We Listened!

[j00r0m4nc3r]

"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,""

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??
/me boggles

Re:We Listened!

[jonbryce]

Well not really. The sudden concern for netbook users was caused by the possibility that people might switch to linux. When the original linux powered Asus EEE PC was released, it was so popular, it pushed Microsoft into third place behind Apple and Xandros for OS shipments that month. I imagine that would give monkey-boy a bit of a fright.

Re:We Listened!

[Again]

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.

Re:We Listened!

[aztracker1]

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.

Feedback

[Thanshin]

We took all the feedback.
Printed it.
Made bricks with the printed feedback and some glue.
Built a piramid with the bricks.
Painted it green and brown.
Called it Mount Feedji.
Burned it down in a massive party.

Then, still drunk from the party, we designed W7.

.

Ok, that was a lie. We didn't actually paint it. But we considered that suggestion for quite a long while.

Let's give the devil his due

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 7 plain rocks. Seems like Windows 2000 just got reincarnated and polished.

I've been running it for a while now and have no issues.

Mojave Experiment 2.0

[Coopjust]

7 truly is Vista SP3. And I don't say that in a negative fashion; Vista runs very well on my two desktops and laptop.

However, minus the new taskbar (which I think is a massive step forward), there really isn't that much that's new. A little bit faster, a little bit less buggy.

In the end, 7 is Mojave Experiment 2.0. Microsoft tried an ad campaign, it failed because people wouldn't get over how "bad Vista is". Microsoft gives it new clothes and a new name- now it's the best version of Windows EVER!

In short, Microsoft went back to marketing after the Vista launch floundered and destroyed its reputation (due to a bunch of underpowered computers with poorly written drivers giving the OS a bad reputation).

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[EvanED]

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

Re:Whoever proposed a bigger memory footprint than

[int69h]

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?

Re:Yes

[L4t3r4lu5]

I'm fairly sure they would too :)

Re:An F-15 is much bigger than a P-51. OMG BLOAT!

[schnikies79]

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.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

This is like a wife of 30 years, bringing up stuff you did in high school!

I'm guessing you're not married.

Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[tenzig_112]

I get the impression that the Windows 7 launch is a lot like seeing an old girlfriend suddenly show up on your doorstep wanting to get back together. She's had some work done, apparently: stomach stapling to take off some of the weight, breast augmentation, and a radical nosejob to make her look as much like your current girlfriend as medical science will allow.

She's pretty, of course, almost too pretty. She still wears far too much makeup and carries that desperate look in her eyes. The fragrant haze around her is the perfume she overuses to mask the scent of failure.

But standing there in that low-cut top, you'd almost forget for a moment what a psycho she was- how she used to shut down in the middle of a date and forget everything you were talking about and how she was only happy when you were buying her things. You'd almost forget about carrying around her legacy baggage or those nights when, for seemingly no reason at all, she would simply stop speaking to you and when you asked what was wrong she'd just spit a string of hex code at you and expect you to figure it out.

You complained about her for years before finally deciding to get rid of her, and here she is again. Though, somehow she seems like a completely different person now.

"I'm up here," she says when she catches you staring at her chest.

Tempted though you may be, you know that over time she'll get bored and slow down on you just like she always does. And then you'll be right back where you started: trapped. She keeps you by convincing you that you don't have a choice. You're just not smart enough for one option or rich enough to afford the other.

"But I'm different now," she says, batting her eyes innocently. "I've changed."

Indeed she has. Apparently, she's really into Cabala now or something like that. It's helped her discover loads of untapped potential in herself. But it also means that you'll have to buy all new furniture to fit with her understanding of feng shui. That's not the only change she has in store for you. The minute you let her move in, she'll have a new alarm system put in that succeeds only in preventing your friends from coming over on poker night.

She doesn't love you, but she doesn't hate you, either. The truth is that she couldn't care less one way or the other. She's here because she doesn't want to be alone. Like all human beings, especially those well past their prime, she wants to feel wanted and, after a string of lost jobs and bad investments, she needs a place to stay.

But all in all, she's OK. She's a seven. She'll do, I guess.

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[vulgrin]

Lets continue the analogy:

Your OSX Girlfriend shows up on your doorstep telling you to buy her a new Snow Leopard coat. Oh, and you are going to need to get her some updated pants and shoes too to match. Of course, she won't step inside your door until you've gone and bought one of those new Apple brand "iMansions" that, really, is just the same as the Intel Houses that everyone has, but comes with fancy aluminum siding and costs twice as much. You could TRY to put aluminum siding on any old Intel house, but you hear those contractors are getting sued out of business.

So, you finally get the new mansion and invite her in and you realize that she's really just like every other girl you've been with. But, all your friends like her, so you might as well go along with it. She's arty, but very serious too, and won't play any games with you. After a while, after buying her all her iAccessories you realize you really aren't getting any more out of her than your other girlfriends.

But your Linux girlfriend, she is awesome. She'll do whatever you want, whenever you want, rarely complains and will stay in pretty much any house or mobile home you have. Sadly, she's also a robot who gets delivered to your house in a box, and you have to assemble her up the way you want. You have to turn to your friends and the internet to find out why the heck she won't talk with you, or why her feet are on backwards. She's very secure in your relationship, so much that she won't do anything unless you really PROVE you are her boyfriend. She plays a few games, but you're getting sick of chess, solitaire and downhill sledding penguins. And then every few weeks you have to shut her down to replace her heart and lungs. You are so damn tired keeping her running and happy all the time who has time for sex?

To top it off, everyone has seen her naked. She's put it all over the Internet for everyone to see and fiddle with her naughty bits. She claims it makes her a better woman, but since you have to keep patching her up, you aren't so sure. What's worse, she keeps comparing you to some guy she met in Finland and talks about how much he "got inside her."

Re:Whoever proposed a bigger memory footprint than

[washu_k]

While I think you got it backwards, I get your point. 3.1 -> XP was a bigger jump than XP -> 7

However:
3.1 required 2 MB, ran OK on 4
XP required 128 MB and ran OK on 256. That is 64 times what 3.1 needed over 9 years
7 requires 1 GB and runs OK on 2 GB. That is 8 times XP over 8 years

7 doesn't look too bad.