furrbear | Guess Microsoft Forgot How Folks Feel About Vista (Reply)

Good Morning Silicon Valley

Pent-up demand for a Vista replacement? Who would have thought?

By JOHN MURRELL

Microsoft surely anticipated a crowd when it announced this week that 2.5 million current users of Windows Vista SP1 would be allowed to download a free beta of the upcoming Windows 7 starting at noon Pacific today (see "Microsoft offers Vista users something beta"), but it apparently wasn't ready for the Wal-Mart-on-Black-Friday kind of mob that gathered outside its virtual doors and collectively clicked its servers into whimpering submission. With the Web site faltering under the load, Microsoft called a timeout and said it needed to add "some additional infrastructure support to the Microsoft.com properties before we post the public beta." No ETA was given, and prospective downloaders have been left to mill about aimlessly, checking their favorite tech news sites for a new go signal and talking among themselves about the benefits of BitTorrent