Floating IT lab woos Windows 7 app testers

Skytap is calling all Windows 7 app testers onto its floating IT lab. Backed in part by Bezos Expeditions - the personal investment arm of Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos - Skytap offers a virtual IT test lab that runs in, yes, that nebulous place people call the cloud. And with Microsoft set to release Windows 7 RTM code later this …

[Ken Hagan]

A small target market, surely?

Unless I'm *new* to the software industry, I almost certainly already have test machines, quite possibly running various OS images atop VMware or similar, so I don't see how an alternative costing $500 per month could "break even" under *any* usage rate, let alone the 3 hours per day suggested here.

Also, these machines are all going to be VMware images, which means no testing of anything relating to exotic hardware or anything beyond pretty mundane graphics. That rules out pretty much everything that might break in moving from one version of Windows to another.

On the other hand, if Jeff knows how to take a problem like software testing for near-infinite permutations of platform and turn it into an embarrassingly parallel problem for one very tightly constrained platform, I'm all ears.

[Goat Jam]

Huh?

Either that, or you could download Virtualbox or vmware server and do it yourself.

Without the lag.

Or the bandwidth costs.

For free.

Even better, just stick with Linux and ignore W7 completely.