I really doubt that much of anything really leaks from MS. What gets out is likely to be intended to get out. And I suspect they have ways of dealing any anything that does get loose, so to speak.
Ed
I really doubt that much of anything really leaks from MS. What gets out is likely to be intended to get out. And I suspect they have ways of dealing any anything that does get loose, so to speak.
Ed
The reality of the leaks is that M$ wants people to have it and get addicted to W7 so that they will move away from XP. We can try to guess all of the reasons but the bottom line is marketing. M$ couldn't have paid for the kind of word-of-mouth advertising that we all have provided for W7.
Using a daily/interim build is retarded in my opinion.. It's not even a finished build.. Obviously there will be problems in a daily build that aren't in a finished build such as 7100 (for example)..That's why a good portion of the support questions for those builds were pointless to answer.. There is no point in critiquing or trying to "fix" a daily/interim build.. Which is why those builds being leaked were nothing but good for Microsoft..
As one who stepped into this thread later and read it through before posting i want to say that i've never seen such a collection of completely and utterly correct answers, almost everyone of them. Marketing tactics, research and development, even the thought that they could morally put whatever code they want in a build that they never intended to release.(maybe foremost to the more paranoid among us.) All these things add up to the fact that the best way to produce quality code is to physically beat the kinks out of it in a real world environment and the harshest environment available at that, And if you top that with the proverbial cherry of positive buzz around the tech community, you have a highly successful business plan. When you think about how good of an experience this was and continues to be for most of us, and that it seems like it will be the same for MS one sobering question comes to mind: Now that the profitable companies have discovered the many benefits of community support will this be a blow to linux/GNU and freeware in general we still have free and still designed the community model hopefully it will be enough.