Andrew Gormley

Q: What’s the one of the largest file distribution technologies currently in use that Microsoft refuses to acknowledge, let alone utilize?

A: Bittorrent!

For those of you following since Friday, Microsoft has been having some troubles keeping their servers online in the wake of this free open beta extravaganza. It seems pretty silly to me to ignore a technology that can deliver your product drastically faster than any cluster of servers ever could. Plus, members of the bittorrent community are, in general, pretty good people. The faster I’m able to download something, the more likely I am to pay it forward in the form of letting a torrent seed until my ratio is at least 1:1 or even 2:1.

This is really an ideal time for a company like Microsoft, who doesn’t have the best reputation with the open source community, to embrace this independently developed technology. Microsoft must be aware that almost every version of Linux is available via Bittorrent and how much money that saves them in the form of server fees, making it simultaneously one of the fastest and most cost effective means to distribute. So instead of my familiar bittorrent program interface, I have to look at this nonsense (after Microsoft resized my browser window without asking):

Oh yeah, it also couldn’t download in Safari, regardless of what I tried, so major points off there†.

My point is that, fight it all they want, this file will†† end up on bittorrent sites anyway since users aren’t accustomed to waiting in a digital queue for our files. We live in an on-demand world and all it will take is just one major company with some big brass ones to step up to the plate and shed some positive light on the advantages of this amazing bittorrent technology.