Here, I'll actually answer your question with something useful!! Outlook Express has been replaced with Windows Mail in Vista and Windows Live Mail for Vista and 7. If you're an OE user, it should be familiar territory! It uses the same engine, but it looks a little bit different.
Now I go off-topic...
As for being an unpaid beta tester? Um... no. That's what all of us who were members of the various technical betas did, thank you very much. We're the ones who make sure that the things that ship out to you are as excellent as possible.
But darn it, I gotta apologize if we're not able to make sure that your skeezy Dynex soundcard from 2001 and that old copy of WordPerfect Office that you bought in 1997 work right. We were just too busy making sure that the damn thing works right for the other 98% of people out there. And you know what?
It does.
There were over 500,000 of us in the Windows Vista and Windows 7 technical betas installing, breaking, re-installing and then breaking again all the builds that came out of Redmond. We installed as much software as possible, made it work if we could. We wrote hundreds of thousands of emails to the Windows team describing every possible crash, sent in perhaps millions of reports on various issues both hardware and software.
Then maybe a million more even after product launch.
That's why there were so many of us who were both baffled and insulted when Windows Vista received such negative press. The amount of whining and crying from people led me to adopt a personal mantra: "Anyone with a Windows Vista problem is a liar." There were too many things that people said that I could never once re-create.
It never runs slowly for me, even on a 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 netbook with 1GB of RAM. Even the GMA950 graphics run Aero smoothly. I used Aero on a box with a PCI video card without fault. Oops. Guess it's not slow.
It isn't incompatible with any of my software, and I use some things that date back the mid-1990s. Oops. Guess it's not incompatible.
It doesn't crash. Oops.
It works with more hardware than Windows XP ever did. Example: Did you know that you can't install Windows XP on a computer with a native SATA controller without quite a bit of voodoo? Enough that a casual computer user will never understand it. Windows Vista works perfectly because it was designed with SATA in mind. Oops.
Lots of mistakes there. Guess Microsoft forgot to check the option for "Suck" when they compiled the golden master because for every asshat who blogged about "bugs" and "problems," there were another thousand for whom it was smooth as glass.
So... sorry if I take a little bit of pause with your claim that paying users are treated as testers. I guess knowing better just helps me feel more informed.
