Windows 7 Beta Rollout Fails Without BitTorrent

[Aliyans]

While I like bashing Microsoft for their inadequacies as much as the next guy, there must be a reason why they chose not to release the beta of their OS on Bittorrent for the second time.

They are a frugal company. There is a blatant contradiction that this article has pointed out: the Bittorrent protocol would save them money and get the beta out to everyone faster, and yet they refuse to use it.

The article accounts for this contradiction by insinuating that Microsoft is unwittingly stubborn and unaware of the advantages of Bittorrent. I think the giants at Microsoft got where they are today not on pure luck. They are smart, many with PhD's; so there must be a flaw in this article's argument.

I can think of two possible reasons to account for their aversion to the protocol:
(1) They don't want to endorse a protocol that is widely used to steal their software and are willing to fork out a few extra dollars for the HTTP servers.
(2) They want to control the distribution of their software for a good reason.

Also, I got shitty speeds on the Windows 7 torrent on mininova. The article's characterization of Bittorrent is idealistic. After an hour of downloading at 150Kb/s, I finally stumbled across the previous article about Windows 7 on this site, and downloaded it from Microsoft at 6Mb/s.

The writer of this article just hates Microsoft, and loves Bittorrent. It's from torrentfreak, ffs. How more biased can you be?

very true... may be they think that the reason they need more focus on preventing pirated Xp/Vista like WGA validation etc is bittorrent..

More over bittorrent is only widely accepted in our pirateworld..nobody else is widely using it.. also if they release it via bittorrent..may be we dont know their own torrent file will be used all over torrentsites..n they will be helping us to distribute more copies than they intented.. i believe beta test copies are limited

[tesco]

ah, I just realized originally microsoft was only allowing 2.5million copies to be downloaded.
That's another reason why they didn't use bittorrent... it wouldn't allow them to limit the downloads.

[SonsOfLiberty]

While I like bashing Microsoft for their inadequacies as much as the next guy, there must be a reason why they chose not to release the beta of their OS on Bittorrent for the second time.

They are a frugal company. There is a blatant contradiction that this article has pointed out: the Bittorrent protocol would save them money and get the beta out to everyone faster, and yet they refuse to use it.

The article accounts for this contradiction by insinuating that Microsoft is unwittingly stubborn and unaware of the advantages of Bittorrent. I think the giants at Microsoft got where they are today not on pure luck. They are smart, many with PhD's; so there must be a flaw in this article's argument.

I can think of two possible reasons to account for their aversion to the protocol:
(1) They don't want to endorse a protocol that is widely used to steal their software and are willing to fork out a few extra dollars for the HTTP servers.
(2) They want to control the distribution of their software for a good reason.

Also, I got shitty speeds on the Windows 7 torrent on mininova. The article's characterization of Bittorrent is idealistic. After an hour of downloading at 150Kb/s, I finally stumbled across the previous article about Windows 7 on this site, and downloaded it from Microsoft at 6Mb/s.

The writer of this article just hates Microsoft, and loves Bittorrent. It's from torrentfreak, ffs. How more biased can you be?

very true... may be they think that the reason they need more focus on preventing pirated Xp/Vista like WGA validation etc is bittorrent..

More over bittorrent is only widely accepted in our pirateworld..nobody else is widely using it.. also if they release it via bittorrent..may be we dont know their own torrent file will be used all over torrentsites..n they will be helping us to distribute more copies than they intented.. i believe beta test copies are limited

Noone uses it besides pirates, ummmm...no Linux and many business are statting to use the tech, Google it.

[Aliyans]

very true... may be they think that the reason they need more focus on preventing pirated Xp/Vista like WGA validation etc is bittorrent..

More over bittorrent is only widely accepted in our pirateworld..nobody else is widely using it.. also if they release it via bittorrent..may be we dont know their own torrent file will be used all over torrentsites..n they will be helping us to distribute more copies than they intented.. i believe beta test copies are limited

Noone uses it besides pirates, ummmm...no Linux and many business are statting to use the tech, Google it.

but its starting to use..not common yet.

And reality..but even though they use direct download that wont limit copies they intended to distribute..as its not difficult to create a torrent as all know

[SonsOfLiberty]

Heavy Traffic Forces Windows 7 Beta Delay, BitTorrent Chugs Forward

At CES 2009, Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft said, "I believe Windows will remain at the center of people's technological solar system." Steve Ballmer focused his keynote speech on Windows 7, and announced that a beta release would be distributed worldwide today. While Windows may be at the technological center, its distribution platform clearly is not. Because of overwhelming traffic, Microsoft has made Windows 7 Beta unavailable and delayed its launch.

According to the Windows 7 blog, it appears Microsoft's servers couldn't handle the overwhelming traffic.

"Due to very heavy traffic we’re seeing as a result of interest in the Windows 7 Beta, we are adding some additional infrastructure support to the Microsoft.com properties before we post the public beta. We want to ensure customers have the best possible experience when downloading the beta, and I’ll be posting here again soon once the beta goes live. Stay tuned! We are excited that you are excited!"

At 2.5-3.2 gigabytes a pop, it's little wonder why Microsoft is running into serious distribution problems. Microsoft has already promised 2.5 million product keys for Windows 7, so the demand for the operating system was already known to be impressive. But centralized distribution being what it is, Microsoft did not have the infrastructure in place to meet the demand. Although not publicly advertised, the original direct link still works - but the 32 bit version appears to be loading very slowly.

It’s clear that centralized distribution failed Microsoft. But the same sized download hasn’t seen failure in the hands of BitTorrent. The BitTorrent protocol is designed exactly for this type of situation, yet this advanced distribution medium is clearly absent from the center of Microsoft’s technological solar system. Instead of relying on a single server, or even dozens of servers, BitTorrent takes advantage of swarming among peers. By distributing the processing and bandwidth work to an unlimited number of peers, the failure of peers within the swarm has a limited influence on the ability to distribute of a file. As evidenced by visiting any BitTorrent web site, Windows 7 and files many times its size are transferring without a hitch within the P2P community.

But don’t expect to see a sanctioned torrent link from Microsoft anytime soon.

http://www.slyck.com/story1819_Heavy..._Chugs_Forward

[Brenya]

Actually you missing it, so Linux supports BitTorrent so that makes Linux evil?

Microsoft has an anti-piracy image to uphold, since their software is expensive and widely pirated. It also has money. Linux developers don't have an anti-piracy image to uphold, since their software is free. It's developers are also dirt poor.

Free and open-sourced software developers do encourage software as such, and are commonly seen as the philosophical antithesis to large software developing corporations such as Microsoft. If Microsoft uses Bittorrent, many people would associate it with at least an acceptance of the open-sourced and/or pirating communities by association, both of which believe in free software and one of which taking it one step further. You could argue that Bittorrent is "just a protocol," but many people associate it with free software and piraters.

You just cannot dismiss the negative consequences of a corporation associating themselves with piraters. Companies only use Bittorrent because it saves them money.


Also, Microsoft's centralized distribution "failed" because they did not anticipate the number of downloaders. They are getting more servers, because in making their decision, they underestimated the resources necessary. The only reasonable inference I got from this article was that Microsoft is extremely popular and Windows 7 is extremely anticipated.

There could even be very legitimate security issues that we are unaware of, so you can't jump to the conclusion that they "should have gone with Bittorrent." You simply have only superficial knowledge of their decision-making process. Your conclusion is just based on the weak assumption that there is no legitimate reason to abstain from using Bittorrent.

[SonsOfLiberty]

Actually you missing it, so Linux supports BitTorrent so that makes Linux evil?

Microsoft has an anti-piracy image to uphold, since their software is expensive and widely pirated. It also has money. Linux developers don't have an anti-piracy image to uphold, since their software is free. It's developers are also dirt poor.

Tell me, how does this not make sense that Microsoft would stick to HTTP servers, and Linux would resort to pushing the resources onto its users?

Microsoft did not anticipate the number of downloaders. They are getting more servers, because in making their decision, they underestimated the resources necessary.

The only reasonable inference I got from this article was that Microsoft is extremely popular and Windows 7 is extremely anticipated.

Ummm, there server wouldn't have crashed if they had a torrent link. Oh common, lay off the anti piracy acts, look at it this way, why would Microsoft want any more bad fate? If a user see's a torrent link, they think, "wait a minute, maybe Microsoft aint' so bad after all". BitTorrent is good, just because it's mainly used for piracy doesn't mean it's bad, if Microsoft is so ashamed of BT, then what about the Universities that are using it, should they be shut down? The reaason school's run BT is because, it "Conserves" Bandwidth compared to everyone hitting a server (and of course paying for that server), the more seeds the faster it goes, you get a 1,000 hits to a server and you get a slow down, with torrent you get a speed boost, in some form or another That's the whole point of torrent....

Nice way to change your post after I alredy quoted you

You just cannot dismiss the negative consequences of a corporation associating themselves with piraters. Companies only use Bittorrent because it really saves money.

So compaines that use BT are pirates and since it's cheap they are pirates? Guess I need to stop using that dirty Linux OS

[clocker]

I don't believe that MS's big problem was rolling out the .ISO images, it was the activation keys that brought them down.
The original plan was to issue the key and then link to the appropriate image for download.

Even during the stretch that MS was "down" and mute, I was able to start- and complete- the download of both 32 and 64 bit images...and at a fair speed at that.

When they reopened for business, they released a list of 10 keys- five for each version- instead of generating discrete keys for each user.

Releasing the images on torrents wouldn't have made any difference in this case as that was never the bottleneck.

[Brenya]

I don't believe that MS's big problem was rolling out the .ISO images, it was the activation keys that brought them down.
The original plan was to issue the key and then link to the appropriate image for download.
...
Releasing the images on torrents wouldn't have made any difference in this case as that was never the bottleneck.

So they had a shortage of keys, not bandwidth?

[clocker]

So they had a shortage of keys, not bandwidth?

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.

The problem then became how to obtain a key and obviously this is where MS really screwed the pooch.
On day two, they finally gave up generating discrete keys for each user and just published a generic list...oddly, still split into 32 and 64 bit flavors even though it had been determined that any key would work with any version.

Since I'm not an expert in things like this, it's hard to say how they could have done better but I don't think torrenting the .ISOs would have made much difference since it was the keys that brought them down.