Own up now please. Were you a Vista tester? If so, why didn’t you tell Microsoft about the problems? Forgotten what they were already?

• UAC.. you ask nicely and are still told ‘NO’..
• DRM.. Listen to music? On your own MP3 player? Hahahahaha
• Calculating the time to calculate how long the transfer of a 26k Word file to a flash drive will take
• Windows Explorer custom settings.. they reset back to factory each time you open Explorer
• Windows Fax and Scan.. the end of twain drivers
• HDD partition minimum.. 60 - 80gb? But.. but that’s the whole drive!!

There were others, and Microsoft were told about them, but there was no room for negative remarks. The people who swooned in the presence of the pretty interface and DreamScene were deemed to be considerably more positive, and they were the ones who got heard. Those of us who told Microsoft that silver surfers and the average family were not going to take kindly to some Vista features were pushed aside, notwithstanding that many of us are the people on the front lines of PC sales and repair.

Anyway, the upshot is that testers as a whole are being held partly responsible for the failure of Vista.

Has the same thing happened again with Windows 7? If I tell you that, by the time the beta was handed out to the army of testers, it was pretty much a ‘fait accomplis’, perhaps somebody could let me in on exactly what would have been a good time to tell Microsoft about the mistakes.

From the above, you would have to get the impression that ‘beta testers’ are not the fly in the ointment because a beta tester’s mandate is only to discover and report bugs. So who are these testers who let the side down?

Beta testers are all types of computer users, from Hyper-user to interested soccer/hockey mom. This group of testers has way more to offer than pure bug detection. They are perhaps the broadest range of users under one roof, with the broadest range of experience, being from all walks of computer life.