Gina Trapani: “This morning Microsoft’s web servers fell to their knees under the pressure of constant web page refreshes by enthusiasts who want to volunteer their time to test Windows 7 after Steve Ballmer’s announcement the download would be available at noon today. […] Is it fantastic that Microsoft is offering this freebie preview? Yes. Is it shameful that they’d be so woefully unprepared for the demand it would draw? That also would be a YES.”
(Yes, I know, this post has nothing to do with the last one, but I couldn’t resist the title.)
Microsoft has some serious image rehabilitation to do after Vista, and they seemed to be well on their way with all the positive buzz around the Windows 7 beta that found its way onto BitTorrent last month. As El Reg noted, Microsoft turned an uncharacteristically blind eye to the leak (“oddly, Microsoft, which grumbles loudly and often about the ‘illegal’ distribution of its software, remained pretty quiet on the whole affair”); I’d go a step further and suggest that, in a deftly 21st century fashion, it was likely behind the leak in the first place.
So it was no great surprise when Steve Ballmer announced during his CES keynote this week that Microsoft would be opening up the beta to the general public, or at least to the first 2.5 million people who downloaded it. Create demand by capping the number of people, keep the buzz going, and, as Gina says, get a few million enthusiast beta testers for free. How open source-y. Microsoft is finally started to get it, I thought.
Now I’m not so sure. I’m inclined to be charitable though: Perhaps Microsoft just underestimated how effective this technique would be in creating demand. Even I stuck close to the computer yesterday, eager to get my hands on the beta (I’m mostly curious to see how they’re interweaving Windows and their cloud stuff).
I’m sure that Microsoft will get it right next time, and that they’ve learned a valuable lesson from all this. As for me, I’m still clicking reload, just not quite as often.
I’m not sure what you think they got wrong. They got yet another positive story about Windows 7 into the news cycle and all they had to do is limit the number of servers available for downloads.
“I’d go a step further and suggest that, in a deftly 21st century fashion, it was likely behind the leak in the first place.”
MicroSoft was not behind the leak of Windows 7 beta, the source code and the CDDL (license) was excluded.
If they had actually wanted to make it widely available in a scalable way they would have used BitTorrent, just like OpenSolaris and Linux does. As your first commenter says, smells of marketing to me.
So if this was a marketing ploy was the OOo v3 release also? ;-)
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2332480,00.asp
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Wasn’t it only a few weeks ago that Sun’s servers collapsed under the load of the JavaFX release?
Ironic no? :-)
Touché :-) -ian
I got Windows 7 beta 7000 installed today and it’s better than Vista. They MS, obviously were bad hurt with Vista and it’s huge fat footprint. All of my drivers work, and the test low end machine a 2.8 P4 with 1 GB runs acceptably for daily use.
MS doesn’t like torrents I suppose.
Java 6.11 runs fine. Yeah!!! FF 3.1 with the built in JAVA compiler runs great, as does chrome A2.
And now for a plug — I sure wish Sun would get back into the Workstation business. Especially software development workstations. Read that as the fastest monster compile box you can build. It’s painful to buy another to run Solaris builds. I can’t afford a server — sigh.
I agree with anon and Simon, it was just a really good way to get into the news in a kind of positive way.. They moved it to Akamai later on, like most of there downloads, which is a bunch of Linux-servers. It would have been better if that was included in the newsitem. People would get a much better idea of what is really going on.