Thursday, July 21, 2005

Passionate customers make for passionate engineers

This morning I got an email forward from Jim Allchin. Apparently, an eager Microsoft customer FedEx'd two pounds of inscribed chocolate to one of our test managers, Paul Donnelly:



How cool is that?

In case you're wondering, the guy's invitation to test Longhorn Beta 1 was sent out yesterday, and the chocolate is being made available in the Longhorn shiproom for everyone to enjoy today.

Update: To be clear, Hershey's makes the tasty chocolate, but is not the customer. </disclaimer>

19 comments:

Diego said...

LOL, I wish I had such an imagination. Now what can I do to get the beta? Dance?

Anonymous said...

If I say Preeeeeety please, can I get an invite? :P

Anonymous said...

I recon you could need a "power user" / "average joe" / ".NET Developer" from Sweden, beta testing Longhorn Beta 1 ? ;) No point in overlooking what the effects of dirrefent timezone settings could be =P

Anonymous said...

They need someone to test if Longhorn works flawlessly with World of Warcraft, cos that's satisfaction for roughly 2 million users.



... *stands up*

Nick said...

I took the lazy route and asked our MS account rep, but if she can't deliver, I might have to send some punch and pie.

Anonymous said...

I just wish someone would send me chocolate.

Anonymous said...

Jeey. I don't NEED to send chocolate to Ubuntu. Canonical sends CD's for free. Open Source can't be bought off with candy ;)

Anonymous said...

No, you don't need to send chocolate to Ubuntu, you need to send source code so it has the same featureset as an operating system targeted at the masses should. Not only can OSS not be bought with candy, it currently can't compete in the business productivity and backoffice sectors. Wake up.

Anonymous said...

Ror at lunix.

Everybody knows that Sun Solaris 10 puts you 10 moves ahead of the competition!

Anonymous said...

Foresight desktop Linux accepts beta users without getting chocolate... However we accept chocolate, it's sure ! lol

Use foresight linux, send us chocolate, and help open-source this way ;)

Anonymous said...

You Linux users have clearly had enough chocolate.

Anonymous said...

Rich: No, you don't need to send chocolate to Ubuntu, you need to send source code so it has the same featureset as an operating system targeted at the masses should. Not only can OSS not be bought with candy, it currently can't compete in the business productivity and backoffice sectors.

Considering that Hotmail ran on FreeBSD for years before Microsoft moved it over to WSS, that argument is pretty poor. On top of that, the NSA didn't seem to have a problem with OSS software when you take into account their multimillion dollar investment into TrustedBSD and SE Linux.

Microsoft and OSS both can play a role in the back office and on the desktop as well. It's up to each individual organization to make that decision for themselves.

Anonymous said...

You could beta test FireFox :-)
And as good ol M$ isn't going to release IE7 for Win 2000, 98x, or NT this gives alot of people a real reason to test and use a real Browser.

http://www.gentoo.org/

Anonymous said...

i don't want to test that crap. my slackware box is sweet, no need for change ;-).

Anonymous said...

Everybody knows that Sun Solaris 10 puts you 10 moves ahead of the competition!

Yeah, but you can't send chocolate to Sun, it would melt!

Anonymous said...

Why are linux users so eager to let the world know they use linux?
It's an OS, ffs.

Anonymous said...

I'm a linux user, I don't go off telling everyone about it. When I was new to it I was telling everyone about it but after a while it becomes normal.
Just like Longhorn once you get it, you'll be telling everyone you have one, then after a while you will get use to it. It's something called "show off", depends on the person.

Now i would like to know more about the security in Longhorn because that's all I'm really concerned about, security is the 21st century's IT enigma.Send me a email at:
ramonklown ___at__pop.com.br

Anonymous said...

I don't care about testing Longhorn, but could I have some chocolate? ;-)

Anonymous said...

So who in MS marketing department came up with this stunt?
Bah.. I refuse to comment on this blog to avoid creating even more publicity for Longhorn. :p