Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 22nd Sep 2006 15:04 UTC
With Release Candidate 1 now out the door, Microsoft is putting what it calls the 'fit-and-finish' on Windows Vista's user interface, and the company is looking for feedback from users testing out the beta release. Dave Vronay, a research manager with the Windows User Experience Compliance team, says Microsoft is taking a lot of time to track down minor UI glitches - something it has never done before. "You can actually participate in this process by providing your feedback on the various pre-release versions of Vista we are putting out," says Vronay. The company is hosting a forum in which users can offer their rants and raves. Also, Microsoft has confirmed all versions of Vista will ship on the same disk.
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RE: "looking for feedback"...now?
by tomcat on Fri 22nd Sep 2006 16:38
in reply to ""looking for feedback"...now?"
Member since:2006-01-06
MS has a lot of customers, and it's probably trying to determine if there are serious adoption blockers. Mostly for corporate types -- but also the mom and pops, too. Given how close MS is to shipping Vista, it's probable that they can't change that much and still meet the ship date; however, it isn't unprecedented for MS to slip its ship date in order to fix serious issues. If, say, GM or Ford or FedEx (or even the little guys) were to find serious adoption blockers, you can pretty much bet that MS would adjust the ship date accordingly. After all, since MS missed the Xmas ship season, it doesn't much matter if it slips out another couple weeks ... or a month.
RE: "looking for feedback"...now?
by ronaldst on Fri 22nd Sep 2006 17:20
in reply to ""looking for feedback"...now?"
Member since:2005-06-29
RE[2]: "looking for feedback"...now?
by Shaman on Fri 22nd Sep 2006 17:27
in reply to "RE: "looking for feedback"...now?"
Member since:
2005-07-08
This makes me wonder if this is just Yet Another Microsoft Attempt of creating a "community feeling" (trendy in software companies these days). Is this going to be useful, now that -RC1 has been out the door for a while, -RC2 is on the way and it's not going to change anything (it's a release candidate, after all) except minor things?
I just feel that there's a increasing number of PR moves done by big software companies, not just Microsoft, to try to look "more friendly" by trying to look like open source communities but that doesn't have any real purpose at the end. When I downloaded the vista beta2 .iso, I though that Microsoft would keep updating it online with the latest improvements (it's not rocket science, debian and ubuntu had been doing that for ages with APT), just like "Firefox nigthlies". But instead they only shipped a couple of critical updates, although they released a much improved version to their beta testers shortly after releasing the beta 2. So what was the purpose of releasing a public beta 2 build, if you're going to leave the users with a huge amount of buggy software for months and users can't report you how the vista development is evolving? Was that something that Microsoft did thinking in the users, or just a "smart" PR move?
Edited 2006-09-22 15:52