Engineers Tell How Feedback Shaped Windows 7 452
An anonymous reader writes "Ars Technica took the time to talk to three members of the Windows 7 product development and planning team to find out how user feedback impacted the latest version of Windows. There's some market speak you'll have to wade through, but overall it gives a solid picture regarding the development of a Windows release."
We Listened! (Score:5, Funny)
Yes (Score:5, Funny)
Feedback (Score:5, Funny)
We took all the feedback.
Printed it.
Made bricks with the printed feedback and some glue.
Built a piramid with the bricks.
Painted it green and brown.
Called it Mount Feedji.
Burned it down in a massive party.
Then, still drunk from the party, we designed W7.
.
Ok, that was a lie. We didn't actually paint it. But we considered that suggestion for quite a long while.
Let's give the devil his due (Score:5, Funny)
Windows 7 plain rocks. Seems like Windows 2000 just got reincarnated and polished.
I've been running it for a while now and have no issues.
Re:Feedback (Score:5, Funny)
I wanted to start a farm on Feedji, you insensitive clod!
Re:Another Slashervertisment for Bill's Winders (Score:1, Funny)
Uhh, a major release of an operating system with 93% of market share dropped today. For some reason there is a lot of press coverage.
Idiot.
Re:Whoever proposed a bigger memory footprint than (Score:2, Funny)
That's Windows Vista and not Windows 7.
4chan has already posted a guide on what is the lowest system you can expect to get windows 7 running on.
I'm bringing this up as an example since it is source outside of the popular media.
Re:Yes (Score:5, Funny)
Re:MS moves fast (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Yes (Score:5, Funny)
I'm guessing you're not married.
Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!" (Score:5, Funny)
I get the impression that the Windows 7 launch is a lot like seeing an old girlfriend suddenly show up on your doorstep wanting to get back together. She's had some work done, apparently: stomach stapling to take off some of the weight, breast augmentation, and a radical nosejob to make her look as much like your current girlfriend as medical science will allow.
She's pretty, of course, almost too pretty. She still wears far too much makeup and carries that desperate look in her eyes. The fragrant haze around her is the perfume she overuses to mask the scent of failure.
But standing there in that low-cut top, you'd almost forget for a moment what a psycho she was- how she used to shut down in the middle of a date and forget everything you were talking about and how she was only happy when you were buying her things. You'd almost forget about carrying around her legacy baggage or those nights when, for seemingly no reason at all, she would simply stop speaking to you and when you asked what was wrong she'd just spit a string of hex code at you and expect you to figure it out.
You complained about her for years before finally deciding to get rid of her, and here she is again. Though, somehow she seems like a completely different person now.
"I'm up here," she says when she catches you staring at her chest.
Tempted though you may be, you know that over time she'll get bored and slow down on you just like she always does. And then you'll be right back where you started: trapped. She keeps you by convincing you that you don't have a choice. You're just not smart enough for one option or rich enough to afford the other.
"But I'm different now," she says, batting her eyes innocently. "I've changed."
Indeed she has. Apparently, she's really into Cabala now or something like that. It's helped her discover loads of untapped potential in herself. But it also means that you'll have to buy all new furniture to fit with her understanding of feng shui. That's not the only change she has in store for you. The minute you let her move in, she'll have a new alarm system put in that succeeds only in preventing your friends from coming over on poker night.
She doesn't love you, but she doesn't hate you, either. The truth is that she couldn't care less one way or the other. She's here because she doesn't want to be alone. Like all human beings, especially those well past their prime, she wants to feel wanted and, after a string of lost jobs and bad investments, she needs a place to stay.
But all in all, she's OK. She's a seven. She'll do, I guess.
Re:Dear God... (Score:3, Funny)
Continued support?
Re:Let's give the devil his due (Score:3, Funny)
I know this is slashdot, but saying Windows 7 is not Ubuntu is just plain ridiculous.
No it isn't. I admit that I haven't used Windows 7 or Ubuntu much, but after even a cursory look I can quite safely say that Windows 7 is not Ubuntu. It is also not MS Bob, GEM, or OS/2, just in case you were still confused.
Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!" (Score:2, Funny)
You'd almost forget about carrying around her legacy baggage or those nights when, for seemingly no reason at all, she would simply stop speaking to you and when you asked what was wrong she'd just spit a string of hex code at you and expect you to figure it out.
Seems like a lot of /.'ers would find women easier to comprehend if this were the case.
Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!" (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Marketing... (Score:2, Funny)
A bit OT, but my Target store is now carrying Mexican glass bottle cane sugar Coca Cola in the food section! Maybe they will begin to carry classic software.
Re:Let's give the devil his due (Score:1, Funny)
Microsoft must have a lot of their people on forums like this right now.
Gotta have that "Go go go Windows 7" push.
Thanks for the mods, astroturfers.
Re:Let's give the devil his due (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!" (Score:5, Funny)
Lets continue the analogy:
Your OSX Girlfriend shows up on your doorstep telling you to buy her a new Snow Leopard coat. Oh, and you are going to need to get her some updated pants and shoes too to match. Of course, she won't step inside your door until you've gone and bought one of those new Apple brand "iMansions" that, really, is just the same as the Intel Houses that everyone has, but comes with fancy aluminum siding and costs twice as much. You could TRY to put aluminum siding on any old Intel house, but you hear those contractors are getting sued out of business.
So, you finally get the new mansion and invite her in and you realize that she's really just like every other girl you've been with. But, all your friends like her, so you might as well go along with it. She's arty, but very serious too, and won't play any games with you. After a while, after buying her all her iAccessories you realize you really aren't getting any more out of her than your other girlfriends.
But your Linux girlfriend, she is awesome. She'll do whatever you want, whenever you want, rarely complains and will stay in pretty much any house or mobile home you have. Sadly, she's also a robot who gets delivered to your house in a box, and you have to assemble her up the way you want. You have to turn to your friends and the internet to find out why the heck she won't talk with you, or why her feet are on backwards. She's very secure in your relationship, so much that she won't do anything unless you really PROVE you are her boyfriend. She plays a few games, but you're getting sick of chess, solitaire and downhill sledding penguins. And then every few weeks you have to shut her down to replace her heart and lungs. You are so damn tired keeping her running and happy all the time who has time for sex?
To top it off, everyone has seen her naked. She's put it all over the Internet for everyone to see and fiddle with her naughty bits. She claims it makes her a better woman, but since you have to keep patching her up, you aren't so sure. What's worse, she keeps comparing you to some guy she met in Finland and talks about how much he "got inside her."
Re:Yes (Score:3, Funny)
Actually, the crashes weren't all bad. Back when I was using W95 at work, I took coffee breaks every time it crashed in the morning. Of course I paid for it; I was in the bathroom during its afternoon crashes.
Re:We Listened! (Score:3, Funny)
The OS is much more important/integral to the user experience than the (different) windshield is to driving.
Try driving down i-75 in Florida WITHOUT a windshield and your mouth open. I bet you will recant this statement :)
Re:We Listened! (Score:1, Funny)
Because for a while (96-98) there weren't concrete standards for DOM interaction beyond document.clear/write/close .. Once the standards were firmed up, things headed in that direction and IE5 was pretty compliant for its' time compared to the alternatives. At that time Opera was pretty much following IE's lead, and Netscape 4.x was a nightmare by comparison. This is even without use of proprietary ActiveX plugins or Java.
Microsoft created an XML interface that eventually became the XmlHttpRequest we all know and love. MS's DOM interactions in IE4 shaped the direction of the W3C DOM specification we have now. It's easy to gripe about MS from today's standards, but when IE4-5 came out it was well ahead of the competition.
This is why your comments are trollish. You could say that from 2003-2007 there was a huge level of disparity between the development of IE and where web based standards have come. And that you have large issues with MS because of this. From 1997-2002 IE was pretty much the best option.
Wow aztracker1! You don't belong on slashdot! Your statement is 100% factual, not taken out of context and does not contain any revisionist views of history.
You sure your in the right place?! Bravo!