Dan’s Space on the Web

I was rather disappointed with Microsoft’s failure to meet their initial promise of distributing the Windows 7 beta to the public on Jan 9th at 12pm. The fact that it was limited to the first 2.5 million people made it worse.

I had delayed a lunch appointment to 12.30pm in hopes of being one of that 2.5 million, and in the end I never got it. It was probably a waste of a good number of other people’s lunch hour as well. No word on their homepage, just the same “want to try the beta? come back in the afternoon on January 9″. They should have at least immediately put up a notice saying that it was delayed, even if there was no ETA – it’s unfair to leave the customer in the dark and having to continuously refresh the page, which I imagine just puts even more load on their servers. Unforeseen demand and server overload? I find that hard to believe. With a catch like “first x number of people”, you should definitely expect tons of people to be desperately refreshing their browsers hours before the release. ok maybe not hours, but close. It looked like a case of bad server management, which is disappointing coming from Microsoft.

Fortunately, they have redeemed themselves with what I think is fair compensation – the beta is not only now properly up and available to the public, but the 2.5 mil limit has been lifted in favor of a limited time approach. The Windows 7 beta is available from the Windows 7 page until January 24th.