The danger in posting this blog entry is that I will be counted as a anti-Microsoft person... which is just not true. I happen to like using the best tool for the job which is not all the time from Microsoft (and sometimes it is). In 2008 I switch my primary system to an Apple Mac. There were many factors as to why and frankly I love it! But I'll always be a technical junkie.

With a number of friends (such as Denny Boynton and Ted Neward) posting about their experiences with Windows 7, I thought it was time to take a look. I thought it was going to be a matter of download, get key, start up vmware fusion and I way I go... but I was wrong.

First I went to the public beta site: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/beta-download.aspx and selected the 64-bit version in english and got this. WTF?? Repeated attempts resulted in the same. An oops page with a pre-canned search. Where did I go wrong? Well as you can tell, I'm on my Mac. So I pulled out fusion to launch Windows XP for round 2 of the attempt.

I thought this is just wrong, but determined to get a look, I switch to windows and my suspicions were confirmed when I got one page further. I got the download page with a couple of large buttons on the bottm of the page and one read "Download Now". Hey, that's what I want... I want to download now. I clicked the button and... nothing. Click... Nothing... No way... they didn't. Round 2 was in XP, but with firefox.

Round 3 as you would expect is XP with IE. That combination was successful and I'm now 29% into my download.

BTW... In the process of testing a few more times in writing up this blog, the round 1 mac failure was fixed to the point where you will get download page (nice response time msft), however the download button fails.

Why is it necessary to be like this? Why is it so hard to put up a link to a download which is platform neutral? Wouldn't Microsoft want to attract customers from other platforms? Does it always have to be all or nothing?