Getting Geeky with Windows 7! My house party and visiting Best Buy on launch day.
Best Buy Windows 7 Launch
One of the great things about working at Microsoft is the company has so many customers, regardless of what your role is people understand at least who it is you work for. I work with developers and designers day to day on our application development stack but my relatives all still consider me the windows guy. If there is a problem that needs troubleshooting I am the family help desk. I think a lot of people in our industry can relate and it only gets worse when you work for the company that makes Office and Windows.
Windows releases are always big and this was my first chance to see the launch of a new operating system from behind the scenes. Having been able to present to a technical audience at numerous launch events I was looking forward to getting regular people’s views on Windows 7.
On Thursday, October 22nd launch I quickly headed out to my local Best Buy to help answer questions and see what the buzz was like.
The first thing I wanted to see was what the retail product versioning was like. In a recent C-Net.com interview Steve Ballmer mentioned that consumers would be seeing simplified versions at retail stores. The lesson had been learned from Vista and consumers wanted a simplified sku base and also where each upgrade version included the features of its predecessor. I am happy to report that the team followed through with Steve’s promise.
Pretty much every laptop and desktop (with the exception of the Netbooks running Starter edition) ran Windows 7 Home Premium. For customers who needed to upgrade to Professional (ability to join domains) or Ultimate (BitLocker and BitLocker to Go) the Best Buy crew had a process in place to do it right there in the store. I took a picture of the display explaining the differences between the three versions and the upgrade prices below.
This was really great to see! Customers were getting a complete Windows 7 experience out of the box with Home Premium on almost all the machines and if they required additional features for their workplace they could get it installed right at checkout.
The next question that came to my mind was what about all those people who had recently purchased PCs and were wondering if they were eligible for a Windows 7 upgrade? Great news on that front as well. I can’t imagine my relatives sticking in a Windows 7 upgrade disk that HP or Dell shipped them and then completely migrating their PC over (in fact I’ve been asked to do this already as an early Christmas present). Great news on that front as well!
As long as a customer purchased a PC between June 26th and October 21st they need only bring the PC into Best Buy and for $40 they will upgrade the entire PC to Windows 7. No waiting for disks to be mailed from the computer manufacturer they simply only need stop by the store and they can get the upgrade.
Common Customer Questions
So what kind of questions did I get asked as The Microsoft Guy in the store that morning. I think it is interesting to note as much as we get swept up in technology on the Internet to everyday people it is still just a tool. To my surprise over half of the people I met did not know it was Windows 7 release day at all. They had just taken the time to go out and buy a new PC that day for various reasons. That was a bit shocking to me but makes sense if you think about how many people out there are running Windows.
Other common themes I heard…
“I need to post pictures and videos to the web.”
“I want to make my own movies.”
“I need to watch DVDs on it.” (the only deal breaker I saw for Netbooks people were just not into having to buy an external DVD drive and worry about getting it setup)
“Does it come with Office?”
This was an eye opener for me too. I am so focused on the tools to create applications (Silverlight, Expression Studio and Visual Studio) or how businesses can create better architecture solutions that I missed what the average retailer customer would be using Windows for.
I can’t begin to tell you how happy the built in Windows DVD Maker made people that day. Windows Live Movie Maker and Windows Security Essentials were also a big hit and every customer I talked to wanted it already installed on their machine.
What features did I demo? Peak, Shake, the new Taskbar, Jumplists and Homegroups were all well received. These hit home with a lot of folks who use windows day in and out and now have an easier way to get common tasks done. Rather then go through each one of them check out this great site that includes 7 second clips of each feature and how people are using them.
I also want to give big kudos to the Best Buy team. Most of them had been up late the night before replacing every PC with the Windows 7 version. This was a lot of machines! Every desktop, laptop and netbook I saw (with the exception of one XP netbook) was running Windows 7!
This included the kiosk demos that run on all the machines when they were idle. These were great covering a lot of the questions I listed above and going over how to publish pictures/video to the web and make movies.
Another thing I noticed was that most of the machines when you would go up to them and click the mouse or touch the keyboard would go to an “overview mode”.
This mode would show an Explore This Computer screen that listed the processor, ram, hard drive space, windows version and included software all in one place. A very slick way to present answers to some of the most common questions people had. Once these common questions around tasks and processing power were answered purchasing a new PC became more of a touch and feel experience. I constantly saw people move from machine to machine until they found one that felt right. For some that meant a certain sized screen while for others it meant the keys on the keyboard being a certain size or alignment. It’s good to be a PC.
House Party
Yes I geeked out and signed up to be one of the House Party hosts. It wound up being a great reason though for a lot of the guys in the neighborhood to get together, eat some pepperoni and cheese, and talk shop.
In fact I was surprised how many IT guys there are in my own neighborhood (thanks to my wife and everybody else's wives for connecting the dots for us). We had SQL DBA’s, Technology Managers from Pharma companies and Microsoft Partners all represented.
Due to the nature of the crowd I decided to dig a little deeper into Windows 7 instead of the general features you saw listed above. I connected one of my HDTV’s to a new HP TouchSmart TX2z tablet I have. This let me show off Windows 7 multi-touch in all its glory. I raffled off the signed Windows 7 Ultimate and everybody who did not win left with a poster or goody bag. Everybody enjoyed themselves and it gave my five year old (that’s her picture in the middle) a chance to show off her party planning and decorating skills.
Happy Windows 7 launch!
