Windows 7 Beta Rollout Fails Without BitTorrent

[Brenya]

Not so much a "shortage" as just a clunky method of distributing them.
Remember, at first MS was only going to release 2.5 million keys...the images were to be available to anyone but without the key, it would only be good for 30 days.

So originally, key requests AND image requests were both funneled through the same system.

Pretty quickly, some of the lucky few who managed to get in put up the "backdoor" link direct to the .ISO files, so it was possible to bypass the (by then crashed) Win 7 homepage and at least DL the image(s)- this is how I got them.

I knew they didn't intend to get as many copies of the software out to as many people as possible, as the article implied and used as a premise to criticize Microsoft for not choosing Bittorrent. They only intended to distribute a finite amount, an amount that their servers could handle; They intended to have as much control over the distribution as possible because of legal and security issues such as key activation, something that the article cynically dismissed without further inquiry.

There we are - two valid reasons for choosing centralization.

The article would have been a good centralized vs. decentralized distribution argument for Bittorrent if it weren't for the moral overtones. But you can find a better argument on Bittorrent's Wikipedia article. This article wasn't written as a Bittorrent vs. HTTP argument, no; the intent of this article was to criticize Microsoft, to create a rational high ground so they could implicitly dismiss the corporation on moral and political grounds for their expensive, buggy, and generally inoperable operating systems.