We’ve received good feedback about RC1 and how its quality has improved over Beta 2. We certainly didn’t do this alone though and I want to reveal the powerful, if somewhat secret, force behind a lot of these changes: our Beta Community.
Our Beta Community is diverse and ranges from new Mac switchers to long-time Windows users. From novices to experts (but in reality, most are super-experts). From influential bloggers to MVPs to small-business owners to CTO’s. There’s a good mix of over 10,000 people.
I met with one of our Beta Testers while he was here in Redmond for our CTO Summit. He’s been a member of the Beta Community since Win 3.1 and hasn’t missed a single release. That’s longer than I’ve been on this team! Despite his busy schedule, he regularly plays with our latest bits, even builds that are very dogfood (newest changes from dev, usually for internal use and testing) . He not only notices what we changed from build to build, but he keeps track of what we change from release to release. He, in my mind, embodies what I think of as Enthusiast.
The best part is, the Beta Community has many Enthusiasts. They spend countless hours, staying up late into the night, installing, tweaking, and playing with new builds. They track down issues, monitor I/O, CPU, battery usage and even mouse clicks to push us to get Vista as good as it can be. They have to endure painful bugs in some builds as we try to isolate and fix issues and they get frustrated at times, but they never give up!
Why do they do this?
I don’t know for sure and can’t speak for everyone, but I think there are a few reasons: First, they have a huge impact. They find specific issues fast and get them fixed. Not just bugs. The Beta Community has pushed for design changes to the product and feature teams have listened. There are several examples where I recall the main motivating reason for changing the design was Beta Newsgroup feedback. Next, is expertise. I believe this is how experts are made: blood, sweat, toil and tears. Seeing the builds evolve over time and becoming familiar with the OS before the rest of the world enables beta testers to develop a very detailed knowledge of Windows. There are people in the BC, from my exposure, that have enough knowledge to write books (and some do). Along with those – I suspect the largest motivation is a love and passion for new technology that keeps them going!
So we owe a lot to our Beta Community. If you happen to discover that someone you know is a Beta Tester, please let them know how much we (and you hopefully) appreciate them, because I can’t thank them enough.
PS – here’s the link if you’re interested in the beta program.