that the vast majority of "beta testers" are lazy software whores who provide little to no useful feedback about the actual product function.
I know that in my industry, software companies just LOVE to feed beta software to high profile graphics houses so that they have marketing fodder come trade show time.
But in a production environment where crazy deadlines are the norm, not the exception, nobody is going to actually be using beta software to get work done. My friends who have access to the software just get off on being able to say they'd seen the latest stuff and piddle around with what's going to be new and then rarely launch it again.
Microsoft has probably realized that if you make it stupid simple, you will at least get partially useful information to work with.
-Kevin S.
Apparently Microsoft wants the Office 2007 beta users to "send a smile" to them when they are doing something good and to "send a sad face" when something is bad. Why is Microsoft treating their beta users as children who can't find the feedback page but instead would rather click on a smily face in their taskbar. Give me a break! Has anyone installed and tried this? How does it work? Does it make you feel a little foolish when you click on the smily or sad faces to send feedback?
From the blog post:
"The best tool to use to give us feedback on Office 2007 Beta 2 is called Send a Smile. Install the Send a Smile tool and two icons are added to the notifications area of the taskbar over by the clock: a happy face to click when you want to give us positive feedback and a sad face to click when there?s something you don?t like."
Read the full blog post here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/05/26/607768.aspx
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