At CES 2009, Microsoft's keynote speech provided by Steve Ballmer announced that Windows 7 Beta has now been released to MSDN subscribers, and will be to the rest of the world shortly. It took a bit of work, but he managed to get the audience to applaud that fact, even though it wasn't a huge reaction. The next few announcements he made, whilst attempting to do his best Steve Jobs impression, just weren't really that impressive - a Windows Live partnership with Facebook so photo's can be shared between the two, and a partnership with Dell to install Live Search and Live Essentials on all new machines. Big deal.
Windows 7 Beta will have most of the final features there, but Microsoft are not allowing it to be benchmarked for the time being and insist that they shouldn't be put off by the bugs as they'll be gone by the time it reaches the final release. There have been some concern from users who complain that it's as bad as Vista. Personally I don't have any problems with Vista, so I'm not sure what all the fuss is about. Some of the features of Windows 7 did get applause - such as the "snap to focus" to allow windows to easily sit side by side to make comparisons easier, for example. The "jump to menu" is another new feature that allows you to jump straight to places within an application, such as in Word it will list your most recent documents, and in Media Player it will list places such as your most recent music.
Think I'll install it on a Virtual Machine later...
