Parental Controls and Press Coverage
We have had a lot of good press coverage from Parental Controls over the past few days, which has been great. Bill Gates and various other people have been pressing it as one of the main reasons to upgrade to Vista, I think it is a very good reason to upgrade if you are worried about your children's safety on the net. The system provides a lot of useful easy controls to make it easier to make sure your child is safer. Of course no system is completely fool proof and there will always be some things that have not yet been plugged up.
The New York Times says "But some of the most powerful new features in Vista are not for hard-core players at all. Instead they are aimed at casual players and, most important, at families. It is not overreaching to say that if you have young children who play computer games or use the Internet you are basically remiss if you do not upgrade to Vista as soon as possible.", which is a nice endorsements of our product.
While most of all the press on the subject has been good, there have been a few negative pieces on the web here and there. There were the comments I talked about previously about the system feeling overwhelming for a parent to use, although really I don't think this is the case for most of what the system does. There is also the stuff Alex St John has written about vista and parental controls. He does make some reasonable points, it is true that ESRB licensing is expensive and not likely to be obtained for downloadable content. This is being fixed though, by ESRB, so that downloadable games can be rated in a reasonable fashion. His comments on the elevation dialog are silly, you want the system to ask if you really want to install something. It should be saying this, since otherwise it might be installing something you don't want it to (like spyware). It is also possible to set the rating on each game seperately so you don't need to use the rating system to achieve this. This article covers the points he brings up quite well too.