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."
Re:We Listened! (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you kidding me?! You're a company named Microsoft. You've been developing operating systems for 30 years. It took you this long to realize that different users have different needs, and that your OS should run on low-end hardware? And you only figured that out because of user feedback??
MS moves fast (Score:4, Insightful)
And yet they could have used the Internet for feedback well more than a decade ago. Glad to see they've finally entered the mid-90s.
Re:Let's give the devil his due (Score:1, Insightful)
Windows 7 is just rebranded Vista.
Vista wasn't terrible to begin with.
Windows 7 is about the same but it's no Mac OSX or Ubuntu, that's for sure.
Re:Whoever proposed a bigger memory footprint than (Score:5, Insightful)
XP requires TONS more ram than Window 3.1 and would be much slower on the same hardware. Do you not agree that XP is progression from 3.1?
Re:We Listened! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:We Listened! (Score:2, Insightful)
Microsoft has a monopoly, they don't need to cater to users.
Users have to adapt to Microsoft. Haven't you noticed?
Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0 (Score:1, Insightful)
Would you consider a laptop with a core 2 duo 1.8ghz .
The laptop I bought 4 years ago at least had a 2ghz duo (which seems fairly robust to me... but
with 1GB of ram underpowered?
Because Vista is unusable on that hardware.
RAM starved to say the least. The last time I had 1 GB RAM was in college (I graduated in 2002). My preference is to always max out the board the first time, therefore saving money on micro-updates later. I really do believe it is the most effective thing you can do to speed up a machine. Sure, XP (and of course Linux) can run on 512 MB, Vista was a new hog in itself. With enough RAM, your processor would have been good enough.
Re:Yes (Score:3, Insightful)
If you have bad hardware or are overclocking, that is a different story, but also your own fault.
Lets be reasonable, this is like a wife of 30 years, bringing up stuff you did in high school!
Re:Nothing to see here (Score:3, Insightful)
Customer Support 101
Re:An F-15 is much bigger than a P-51. OMG BLOAT! (Score:5, Insightful)
From my observations, people are upgrading hardware at a slower and slower rate, so it is relevant. Most I know haven't done a major upgrade, outside of possibly adding ram or a changing video cards, in a few years and don't plan to anytime soon. Hardware has reached a "good enough" point.
I'm on a Athlon X2 with 4gb ram (maxed out). I have absolutely no intention of upgrading anytime soon.
Dear God... (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows 7 is another proof that enough marketing can make something good.
Windows 7, Windows 7, Windows 7, ...
I yet have to find someone who can show me what it brings me, over XP, that is worth paying 100+ EUR for.
Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0 (Score:3, Insightful)
Win 2000 = NT 5.0
Win XP = NT 5.1
Win Vista = NT 6.0
Win 7 = NT 6.1
What did people expect. It's not a new iteration, it's an enhancement. Just because they brand it as a new OS does not make it so.
Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Marketing... (Score:1, Insightful)
Where does Coke in glass bottles with real cane sugar fall in this analogy? Because I want some of that.
Waffle? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:We Listened! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's Microsoft, they take a very long time to do anything right (or do anything at all). Just look at Internet Explorer, they have been working on it since 1994. 15 years later, we are still YET to receive a browser from Microsoft that is at least more than 20% web compliant..
Microsoft does have the technical resources to make IE score 100% on the Acid3 test. However, it is not in their best interests to do so. Here is a quote from Bill Gates (taken from wikiquotes) which demonstrates Microsoft's business strategy.
One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company. We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities.
This is the attitude that Microsoft is developing software with. Just look at the number of businesses that are stuck with IE6 because of some legacy ActiveX application. Microsoft's strategy is working very well for them and I don't see them ever changing.
Window's Explorer... (Score:4, Insightful)
Lack of feedback (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't want to sound like a broken record here, but one of the things I truly love about OSS development is how transparent development is. I can easily contact the developers. I can submit bugs.
I have tons of usability gripes with Windows. I've never felt like I could submit feedback to Microsoft that might be seen and looked at.
Mojave was Vista SP1 (Score:5, Insightful)
What's your point? That mojave marketing stunt didn't address Vista's actual problems.
The Mojave ad campaign came out a few months after the February 2008 release of Windows Vista Service Pack 1, which did address technical problems with Windows Vista.
Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0 (Score:1, Insightful)
Oops, you're stupid.
Re:We Listened! (Score:2, Insightful)
Things are different now, as the single CPU is not any faster and it is even slower (netbooks), such the development assumption also changed. I don't see anything wrong with whole thing.
Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!" (Score:2, Insightful)
There's nothing left to say, I'm going to simply link to this comment in every discussion about W7. Spot-on, and if I could buy you a pint I would.
Is there anything GOOD in windows 7.... (Score:4, Insightful)
...that came from this feedback, that makes businesses using XP want to switch? We all know why NOBODY switched to Vista, so why would anyone switch to win7?
Please, I'm not asking why should NOT switch, we all know that answer. But someone please explain why we SHOULD move to win7 !
Re:We Listened! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I can see it now (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:We Listened! (Score:4, Insightful)
Remember MS has never concerned themselves with consumers; for the most part consumers are not their customers. Companies were their customers for businesses. On the consumer side, OEMs are their customers. Either way, MS never dealt as much with direct consumer support and interaction. If there were support issues, companies' IT departments took care of their business users and OEMs handled the consumers. With Vista, this came back to hurt them as OEMs could simply blame MS on the whole fiasco especially when consumers could downgrade to XP and see a significant performance and stability improvements.
MS also gambled that minimum hardware would advance more than their new OS would bog it down. With every release, MS would redefine what "minimum" hardware requirements meant. With Win95 and 98, minimum meant Windows may be slower if the user was doing processor intensive. More memory would definitely fix it. With XP, "minimum" meant that Windows would be slower especially if the user was doing processor intensive. More memory would fix most things. By the time of Vista, minimum meant you could load Windows onto the machine. Good luck on actually running anything but the OS. More memory might fix it, but CPU and video card upgrades were more likely necessary which meant it would be cheaper for the user to buy a new computer or downgrade to XP rather than upgrade their computer to actually use Vista.
Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0 (Score:3, Insightful)
Memory & performance pig: 7 is a bit trimmed, but the difference really isn't that big.
Re:Let's give the devil his due (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm actually not sure how this got to +4 funny. Maybe +5 interesting? I digress. I've been a fan of Win2k for a long time, I used it for just about everything from gaming to my work up until XP64 and had a stable driver set. Does Win7 have that nifty feel of Win2k? Yes actually it does. Even on lower end hardware it's decently snappy, and runs well.
Issues? The biggest I've found is it's ability to lose connection to the internet on reboots. Meaning you need to disable and reenable your network card which fixes it. Sadly no new drivers for my card, but otherwise works fine. I consider that a 2 on my 1-10(10 being worst) scale of crap. Otherwise, I'm quite happy. My XP64 machine has been up and running for a bit more than 460 days now without a reboot. I expect that Win7 will beat that easily.
Re:We Listened! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Yes (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Yes (Score:3, Insightful)
Windows 2000 had a few internal issues that would cause BSODs to happen without outside interference in certain hardware without 3rd party drivers. Though many 3rd party drivers (I had an older burning software for NT4 that caused 2K instabilities). XP was much more stable, though again plagued by 3rd party drivers, and had quite a few stability issues of its' own.
I would say the core kernel in the NT line of windows has been very solid. Though many different drivers have caused numerous issues. This is separate from some of the userland interfaces in windows which really didn't firm up until XP SP1 and SP2. Win2K was my favorite Windows until 7's beta, but it was a ways away from sorted out. SP4 for Win2K was a big bump for usability and stability (IIRC was about the same time as XP SP1).
Re:We Listened! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yet another troll... (Score:3, Insightful)
There is plenty of trolling. And abuse of mod points.
I happen to think you're right. I'm anti-Microsoft, but honesty makes me say that Win 7 is decent. So far, it works on all the hardware I've tried it on - as old as the original Athlon 1 Ghz machines. Of course, it's kinda slow on that machine, but it WORKS.
Huge improvement over that Vista abortion. Yeah, I know, lots of people thought Vista was good. Well, it never ran right on any of my hardware, including a 2.4 Ghz dual core Opteron with 8 gig of memory. Phhht.
Whatever - people who abuse their mod points like this are total asses, with no life. Screw 'em. Someone with a big stick needs to beat the Slashdot staff til they add new mods. Simple "Agree" and "Disagree" buttons, like has often been suggested should solve the problem. For that matter, those two buttons could be seperate from the rest of the mods - everyone has them all the time.
Amen! (Score:3, Insightful)
I will never understand how file explorer gets WORSE as you go higher in releases. How is that possible?!?! Is there somekind of grand MSFT strategy to wean people from file explorer entirely? I just don't understand a computer operating system that does not allow easy navigation of its file and folder structure.
Note, I am not saying everyone is like me. Rather, I am saying there are enough "me's" out there that this could not have gone unnoticed at MSFT.
Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0 (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll echo the above to a large extent. Here's my take on UAC, as compared to sudo.
First the similarities: they function in much the same way.They have similar (though not completely overlapping) goals, and they protect more or less the same stuff. Back when I first switched to Vista (about six months after it came out), there was still a lot of flap going on about UAC. I decided to keep a log of every UAC prompt I received, and did so for a month. I don't have it handy, but IIRC here is roughly how it came out. There were bascially three reasons I got prompted: (1) I was making an expected administrative change that would have required root on Linux (most of them), (2) there was a bit of the UI that was designed poorly, or (3) I was first logging on and this hardware monitoring piece of software was starting. The second category is the most interesting; almost all (or maybe all) of these were because I wanted to change my environment variables. Even though I was just changing my user's variables the dialog where you do that is also where you change system-wide environment variables; the fact that you could do the latter mean you needed elevation. (Win 7 fixes this dialog so you don't need elevation to change your own environment.) In addition, while I didn't get it for this reason, some people got UAC prompts for things like start menu and desktop changes. The desktop thing wouldn't happen on Linux because neither KDE nor Gnome have the idea off a global "all users" desktop in addition to the per-user one. The changes that caused these UAC prompts were because the change had to affect the all users desktop. I'm not sure how Gnome and KDE store the equivalent of the start menu soo I'm not sure hoow sudo would behave there.
Now the differencees:
1. UAC behaves more like 'su' than sudo. You need the password of the admin user, not your own. For enterprise users, this could be a big deal. For a home user, I doubt it matters much. For a single-user computer, it doesn't really matter in the slightest.
2. UAC doesn't cache its permission. If you need to elevate twice in a row, you have to explicitly elevate twice. At least on a typical desktop configuration, gksudo will cache its permission for a couple minutes. This is the main respect in which, IMO, UAC is more annoying. That said, this rarely happened in my month of UAC logging.
3. UAC is on-demand: a running program can ask for elevation. This is in contrast to sudo, where you need to start with said user's rights. This isn't very different from the end user's perspective as compared to stuff like GkSudo, but is pretty nice as compared to running sudo from the command line, where at least I often found myself going "oops, I needed to start that as root."
4. Even admin users need to elevate, but root doesn't need to sudo. A little annoying if you're doing a loot of admin stuff. Then again, you only need to click 'yes' as opposed to type your password, so it's not too bad. This is important for Windows users where most people are an admin anyway (and hence sudo as-such wouldn't do anything). Speaks more about the Windows architecture and programs than UAC in that respect. (Win 7 changes this; admin users don't have to explicitly elevate as much. Icons with the UAC logo elevate without a prompt. Programs that just want elevation, like installers, still cause a prompt.)
5. UAC checks the program's digital signature, and displays either the confirmed source or a warning about a missing signature; sudo doesn't do any of that. In theory this is a nice win on UAC's part, but in practice I doubt it matters much. A lot of programs (esp. OSS apps) aren't signed, so the presence of that warning usually isn't surprising so I just click through anyway, and (1) you need to a lot of thee time and (2) I even know all about what it's talking about it.
All Microsoft did in 7 is reduce the security, since many users will blindly click through whatever is shown anyways, and power users turn it off.
I don't buy this stat
Re:Let's give the devil his due (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have gone 460 days without a reboot, it's because you haven't been applying security updates. Your system is highly vulnerable, and you are a joke as a system administrator.
Turn in your geek card NOW.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Windows 7 and the Demo Effect (Score:2, Insightful)
I find these glowing reviews of Windows 7 to be, on the whole, quite humorous. After all, this is a continuation of the decades old MS tradition of tailoring software to maximize the demo impact. Specifically, a users first 5-15 minutes is the most important. First impressions and all that rot.
Eye candy certainly plays a part in this, but it's more the subtle hint that the software can do "a lot more than your seeing" that's important. After all, when it comes to software marketing, implied functionality is far more important than actual functionality.
But at the end of the day, what are we really looking at. It looks nicer! For most users, that's about it.
Not to detract from their success. This is a serious psychological coup to pull off.