Windows 7 Feedback Stats That Will Make Your Mind Explode

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Many of you reading my blog may have heard about the Windows 7 Engineering Blog.  This is the blog that gives the everyone a unique peak into the world of Windows OS engineering.  When a single product entails about 90% of the market, you can bet that every single feature, check box, and decision has to be scrutinized at a massive level. 

With billions of people using a computer, each culture as well as individual interacts with the OS in a different way.  With Windows 7, Microsoft has given the community an unprecedented ability to provide high quality actionable feedback in a way that is systematic, manageable, and relevant.  People sometimes wonder how feedback gets used by the products teams at Microsoft.  Here are a few stats that the engineering team have posted about how massive the community efforts have been to making the next version of Windows the best possible OS that can be produced.

STATS

“During a peak week in January we were receiving one Send Feedback report every 15 seconds for an entire week, and to date we’ve received well over 500,000 of these reports.  That averages to over 500 reports for each and every developer to look through!  And we're only through 7 weeks of using the Windows 7 beta, even though for many Windows 7 already seems like an old friend.

  • To date, with the wide usage of the Windows 7 Beta we have received a hundreds of Connect (the MSDN/Technet enrolled beta customers) bug reports and have fixes in the pipeline for the highest percentage of those reported bugs than in any previous Windows development cycle.
  • To date, we have fixes in the pipeline for nearly 2,000 bugs in Windows code (not in third party drivers or applications) that caused crashes or hangs.  While many Beta customers have said they are very happy with the quality of Windows 7, we are working to make it even better by making sure we are fixing the issues experienced by such broad and significant usage.
  • To date, we have recorded over 10,000,000 device installations and over 75% of these were able to use drivers provided in box (that is no download necessary) .  The remaining devices were almost all served by downloading drivers from Windows Update and by direct links to the manufacturer's web site.  We've recorded the usage of over 2.8M unique plug-and-play device identifiers. “

I wonder what the IT infrastructure behind this collection system looks like!