If any one has been following the Windows 7 development, even knows as per Steve Balmer’s keynote @ CES that Friday the Beta 1 of Windows was going to be released; which was great news, I had already run a copy and was quiet impressed but would always rather a legit copy. Here’s what went down first of all MS didn’t release in the morning like most releases do we had to wait until “the afternoon”. The best part is Microsoft said they would limit beta testers licenses to 2.5 million, which sounds like a lot but really isn’t considering how many people use Windows.
The cap of 2.5 million created a gold rush of sorts many people were pounding on the site all day which caused it time out and throw errors here and there. All the while Windows 7 main page said come back Friday afternoon. No updates no nothing. All the while people were getting some download links here and there, MS continually killed most download links posted. Wired posted that we should expect the download to actually open to the public around noon pacific time. There was some confusion and misinformation from Life Hacker with a Technet download of the beta that was released slightly early. Noon pacific time, nothing, nada, not a thing for Microsoft. At about 2 PM pacific time they put a statement up on main Windows 7 page saying they were surprised at the response and are adding more servers to handle it.
If this isn’t a sign that Microsoft just plain doesn’t know what it is doing with marketing, I don’t know what is! MS knows they jumped the shark with Vista (even though I like it very much), and have tried to build anticipation around Windows 7, which is a good thing. Yet they shot themselves in the foot before they even got out of the gate. Things like that just irk me. Ubuntu releases new version and BAM it’s up on a torrent for very fast downloard. Sure Ubuntu’s home page and mirrors get extremely slow but for the most part they stay up. Firefox releases a new version millions of downloads in one day, no site crashes, no I’m sorry we didn’t expect this kind of traffic. I don’t understand how a company with literately billions of dollars behind them can screw the pooch so bad and on the regular!
As for me, I’m one of the lucky ones I got a download but no license key. I’m typing this from Win 7 beta, I like it but am still unhappy with the way MS handled this. Really makes you wonder if they’re capable of doing anything right.
