Geuis writes “I’ll admit, I’m not a big Microsoft fan. I’m an old-time user of Adobe Photoshop, and I love nearly everything it can do. However, in the interest of science, I decided to try out the new beta for Microsoft’s answer to Photoshop, Acrylic. My review is posted on my blog. Final recommendation: Stay as far away from Acrylic as you can. It needs so much development work done, it shouldn’t be out of Alpha testing. If this is anywhere close to the final product they are planning to release, then Microsoft should be prepared to eat another few million in lost development funds. There’s no reason you should have to eat it too.”
I like Microsoft's new attitude though. Not only is it presenting beta's and alpha's more widely to get more criticism , comments and bugreports on its software, it is also more actively LISTENING to them and taking action. Take a look at the beta forums for acrylic and you`ll soon find posts by teh Beta Team acknowedging the comments and critisizm. Hopefully this way the end product will be much (infinitly?) better.
They also seem to be more actively persuing standards, Explorer 7.0 beta which is supposed to come out sometime in summer i think is apparently fully webstandards compliant, AND solves the PNG Transparency problem (that problem sucks for us gfx designers).
There's still a few dinosaurs in the upper level management though, but a lot of the newer/hipper crowd at microsoft is rocking the boat in the right direction.
.. buh-bye..