Just in case you missed it somehow, we released IE7 last Wednesday. In the first four days over three million of you have already downloaded the final release. Thank you!

And from Mike Beltzner’s web log:

Apparently, people loves them some Firefox. Within 24 hours of the official launch on Tuesday, there were over 2 million people using Firefox 2, and we were seeing a peak rate of more than 30 downloads per second from our website.

Based on the numbers that the Firefox team is seeing, uptake of Firefox 2 is more or less twice that of IE7. Or as Luis just put it: people who choose browsers choose firefox.

And with that thought, it will be interesting to see what happens when Microsoft adds IE7 as a “high priority update.” Will people compare the download numbers in the same way?  Is it the software equivalent of a push poll?  For the matter, when we are ready to do automatic updates of Firefox 2 from Firefox 1.5, will people make the same mistakes?

How you interpret numbers matter.  I’m happy with the numbers above, since they reflect a real race: what happens when you release upgrades of two similar products in the same space and let people choose or not choose to install them.

I did an interview at the conference today with Amber Mac for citynews. The full interview is available here and the short snippit that they apparently played during the 7pm news is available here. (I didn’t see it. I wasn’t in front a TV between 7 and 7:30pm.) The snippit feels weird and I don’t think that my voice should ever have a sound track.

The nice thing about having a web log is that you can post errata for an interview. I think I got the weight of the laptop wrong. I think that it’s heavier than a kilogram. I think it’s about two. (Sorry, I grew up in the states and going from pounds to kilograms requires on the fly math – not my strong suit.)

But that’s besides the point. Jim likes to stress that we’re interested in taking what we have and making it faster. There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit there. But I want to not do something that’s only faster, but something that flat out better. That’s an important distinction that I think a lot of people don’t understand.

I just got back from Nat‘s keynote at this conference where he spent time talking about the history of the OED (fascinating story!) and how it’s one of the earliest examples of a collaborative open source project. At the end he was showing off the features of SLED 10 and proving how well integrated and polished it was compared to where we were in 1992 or 1998 or even 2002. And it is – hats off to those guys. I hope they do well with it. Were it not for issues of hardware integration and multimedia, I think we could beat windows out of the box. There’s little question of that in my mind anymore.

But I think one of the things that I’ve been saying inside of One Laptop for a while is that we do have a chance to change that model. Why do we let Microsoft, or Apple for that matter, define what computers have to be? Why can’t we move ahead with the knowledge of the past and create something really new and interesting? Something designed for the laptops, something that solves the specific problems of learning and the environment they will be deployed in. That’s where we’ve been going, and that’s what it takes to really move things forward, both for the kids and the industry as a whole.

It’s not about putting a “Linux Desktop” or “Free Software” into the hands of kids. That’s just a means to an end. We need to solve real problems for real people, and in this case it’s kids. And we can do better than we have. That’s where I think the focus needs to be when we think about how to build our software, how we take existing code that exists in the open source world (of which there is some great stuff!) and move it onto the laptops where appropriate.

Context matters.

Firefox 2 was released. I’m a bit sad about this one. This is one of the first releases where I didn’t have anything to do with it. No bug fixes, no code, and not involved in the release process. But these guys are doing a bang-up job, so I can’t complain. I’ve been running it all week on my machine and I’m very happy with it. No crashes, nice new functionality with a continuation of the clean look we’ve come to expect. Go team!

Fedora Core 6 was released. The work of a huge number of people inside of Red Hat and a standing army of contributors from the outside world who all worked together to produce something really great. It’s stable, has some wonderful new functionality and really came together at the end.

It was a fun week. Especially for the mirrors. (Sorry, Mike.)

Today Andres in the OLPC office in Cambridge managed to get all the pieces together and got one of the cameras working on one of our test-B boards using Jonathan Corbet’s driver. And it looks great. Good frame rate, Xv overlay in X and with a really good resolution. That’s Andres Salomon on the left, Jim in the middle and me on the right taking the picture.

Note that I flipped the picture because the board with the camera is sitting on the desk upside down. The sugar UI elements should be in the upper left hand corner, not the lower left.

The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.

When I arrived, I told the technician my story, and literally begged her to rush the results. “7-10 days is how long it takes for the doctor to review it and get the results to your doctor,” she said. “There’s nothing I can do to speed that up.” I could barely breathe or walk, but I managed to get through the exam. But now the worst part begins… The Wait. The first wait is for the ten minutes it takes for the tech to review the film to make sure the pictures aren’t too dark, light, or blurred. Once they’ve checked the film, they either walk you back to repeat the test, or send you home to start The Wait. So there I sat, waiting for the tech.

I’ve been through this. It’s the worst. 2 days to get results for a test are often the worst of your life. It’s the possibility of fear. Fear around the next corner. Like some kind of slow-motion horror movie where you know there’s some terrible monster sitting around the next bend in the cave and you can’t not go there…

But back to reality. There’s an important lesson here in designing good experiences. If you’re going to make someone wait, transparency is the key to making that wait tolerable, and even enjoyable. The context for the Lotus guys was what they had discovered in building business workflow processes. That is, it’s important that if you submit something to someone else that they are able to see you working on it, or not working on it, what its status is and how long it’s taking. It keeps an otherwise onerous process and makes it seem like you have a sense of control. Taking the sausage out of the factory, I suspect.

Ever send a piece of mail to a customer support center and get back one of those messages that says “Thanks for contacting us! We’ll get back to you in 3-5 working days!” Wouldn’t it be better if they said “Here’s a link to a way to track your problem. You can see who has it, what the status is and how many people are in front of you.” Maybe it would take 5-7 working days, but it wouldn’t matter. At least you could see yourself moving from the back of the line to the front and who owned your problem and what they were working on. Think about it.

But once I made this connection, I started to see the pattern other places as well. Seen a TV while waiting in line at a bank? How about at a bar or restaurant while you’re waiting for food? Those are there because people have discovered that if you have something to distract you, any wait that you have to make appear to take far less time. The experience matters. (See also: JetBlue.)

Another comparison: the US postal service vs. FedEX. When I drop something in the mailbox, I always have to reach deep into this well of trust that I keep hidden and I say to myself It’s the US postal service. They haven’t screwed me before. Of course it will make it. This is in stark contrast to the experience that I get when I’m using FedEX. I don’t have to worry as much about the trust issue. (OK, I probably should but I’m talking about perception here.) I can track that package from beginning to end. I know what city it’s in, I know what its last status was, and they can actively inform me about the status of the package. Transparency at work. I wonder if the guys at FedEX knew they were designing a packaging experience as much as they were a way to route packages around the world.

Why does this matter to us? Because we design processes, too. From the licenses that we put on code, to the way that we work with contributors, to the way that we make decisions. As an example, even if we’re not including people outside of a small group in a decision, it’s important to at least inform people of that change. That at least lets people know that what we’re doing, and why. Not just that that thing has changed.

Remember that what we’re doing here isn’t just about creating programs or making the world more free. Every one of us is part of the experience that others have when they are touching our small world. And every one of them should have a decent experience. You know, so they stick around.

Oh, and of course, the whole point of Kathy’s web log is that you should be thinking about those things all the time when you’re dealing with people. Be it friends, customers, contributors, whomever. Transparency is the great equalizer for fear.

I was down at Red Hat’s Raleigh office last week and one of the guys there snapped the picture of the model that I had brought with me. It’s up on flickr now as part of the Red Hat Magazine collection.

A terrible picture taken in front of that building they always blow up in movies. Mary Lou and Robert look at the test unit.

Last month we took one of the test display units down to the design firm we’ve been working with. They wanted to see how colors looked on the display and what the greyscale mode looks like.

Eben and Lisa talk about colors on the display.

The test units are housed in stainless steel units along with one of the motherboards and a huge-ass daughter FPGA card that houses the display controller. We have a battery attached to the box to be able to take it outside and see what it looks like.

Another really bad picture of the display in black and white mode in direct sunlight.

This doesn’t do it justice, of course. Text on the display in greyscale looks just stunning. At 200dpi, nearly twice what you get on normal displays, fonts are very crisp.