Windows 7 is RTMed

After a week of spec­u­la­tion, it's fi­nally been con­firmed. Today, 7600 was signed off as the final RTM build for Win­dows 7.

Fea­ture-wise, Win­dows 7 is a com­pelling evo­lu­tion. It fixes a lot of the is­sues peo­ple had with Vista and adds in a num­ber of great user-, it-, and de­vel­oper-fo­cused fea­tures. Things like Di­rec­t2D and GDI im­prove­ments, User Mode Sched­ul­ing, im­proved NUMA sup­port, im­proved con­cur­rency, SSD sup­port, and im­proved power man­age­ment will all work to­gether to pro­vide higher per­for­mance com­pared to pre­vi­ous OSes. Li­braries, greater mul­ti­me­dia sup­port (such as AAC and AVC), mouse ges­tures, Media Cen­ter, and a com­pletely re­designed taskbar pro­vide a greater user ex­pe­ri­ence. I think this is def­i­nitely the best Win­dows to date -- bet­ter than XP, and bet­ter than Vista.

Test­ing Win­dows 7 was a very frus­trat­ing ex­pe­ri­ence. In con­trast to pre­vi­ous betas where we got a reg­u­lar stream of beta builds to test, in Win­dows 7 we got only two builds, Beta 1 and the RC. A lot of us ex­pe­ri­enced our bugs being set as not re­pro­ducible in in­ter­nal builds, with no way to test if that were true. Worse yet, shortly after the RC came out many of us had a lot of bug re­ports dis­ap­pear when Mi­crosoft told us to not re­port any bugs that didn't cause the OS to blue­screen or fail in­stalling—so there may well be a large num­ber of un­fixed cos­metic and us­abil­ity is­sues in the RTM.

In­stead, Mi­crosoft cre­ated a much smaller team of spe­cial testers called Test Pi­lots who, along with TAP part­ners, would be the ones to get intrim builds and pro­vide the ma­jor­ity of the use­ful feed­back. I'm not sure who this team was made up of, but I would guess they are testers from past betas who chose to de­vote most of their wak­ing hours to test­ing.

This trig­gered some­thing I'd never ex­pected to see—some­what of a re­volt among testers who felt that their feed­back was doing noth­ing. Morale went down, bug re­ports stopped com­ing in, and a lot of heated dis­cus­sion hap­pened be­tween testers. Even the die-hard testers re­al­ized some­thing was wrong, some of them feel­ing the need to mark their dis­cus­sions to dif­fer­en­ti­ate them as a "proud" tester.

Some be­lieve Steve Sinof­sky (who re­placed Jim Allchin as the head of the Win­dows di­vi­sion) is the rea­son for this total re­struc­tur­ing of the Win­dows beta, but as far as I know noth­ing of the sort has been con­firmed. Ei­ther way, with Mi­crosoft seem­ingly frus­trated at our per­for­mance and our frus­tra­tion at not being able to test prop­erly, it feels like we were of lit­tle use this time around de­spite sub­mit­ting a large amount of bugs. I would not be sur­prised if the tech beta gets scrapped en­tirely for Win­dows 8.

Posted on July 22, 2009 in Micorsft, Windows 7

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