In a blog post, Microsoft has announced it is extending the general availability of the Windows 7 beta from January 24th, to February 10th. People who have already started the download can finish the download as late as February 12th. Product keys will remain available even after the cut-off dates. OBviously, this only goes for the public beta; MSDN and TechNet subscribers will have access to the beta download all throughout the beta phase.
1) Announce something “big” available for a limited time.
2) “Forget” that there’s enough demand to kill your registration servers; it’ll make a nice positive “news” item.
3) Later increase the amount of time for the product to be available, which makes people think, “oh, it must be good, they had to extend the time!”
Meanwhile, they could have just got all the extra servers up on day one, decided to put the download up for a longer period of time to begin with, and continue with their business as usual… but I guess there’s no “news” or positive press to be made out of that.
While on the subject, I will admit, the more I use Win7, the more features I discover and it’s actually got quite a few really nice ones…
Edited 2009-01-24 15:36 UTC
Well, they are the masters of positive spin.
Besides, I would too. The Vista press has been terrible and they need to recover.
The only thing missing right now is the ability to stack windows one on top of the other (splitting the screen horizontally)… or maybe it is there but just not as easy as it was before (CTRL + left on the relevant taskbar entries, right click and select stack …).
Stacking them one next to the other (splitting the screen vertically) is embarrassingly easy and satisfying though.
Also maximizing a window… wow… feels great
.
They… they actually improved the built-in calculator… incredible…
Strangely, the beta installs just fine on my Core Duo Mac mini via Boot Camp, and runs very well too. However, my Dad has not been able even install it on his XP based (but Vista certified) HP laptop with similar specs (1.8GHz Turion, 1.25GB RAM) using the same disc. He can boot the installer, but it hangs just before loading the partition manager. The one time it did make it beyond partitioning, it hung on expanding files and kicked the DVD out of the drive.
One would think it would be the opposite outcome.
Has he installed the latest firmware from HP? its surprising the number of people who don’t keep their computer updated and wonder why they’re experiencing problems with Windows.
Regarding the topic at hand – Windows 7 is looking pretty good; its great to see that they’ve got an application oriented person at the lead given that ones first impression of an operating system is based on ones experience interacting with it at the GUI level. If the GUI isn’t up to scratch, the user won’t like it – no matter how many bells and whistles have been added.
The question is how Windows 7 will compared not only with Snow Leopard but with the *NIX (OpenSolaris/Linux/*BSD etc) distributions at that time. Its going to be an uphill battle to try and convince that Windows 7 is better than Vista. Geeks like us might be convinced but end users who have been stung once by Microsoft maybe hesitant to upgrade given what they were expected (which is a relative term btw) in Vista wasn’t delivered.