I’d rather be right than first

Over the weekend, Dwight Silverman paid me an enormous compliment, placing this site in his list of six favorite tech sites. In his write-up, he said, “The only thing wrong with Ed Bott’s Windows Expertise site is that he doesn’t post often enough.”

I plead guilty, but with an explanation. I try very hard to avoid posting anything here until I’m confident it’s right. That means I don’t idly pass along links to the latest hot news, because more often than not that news turns out to be, well, wrong. And I sometimes take a while to digest the news, because I think people who visit this site expect an in-depth analysis, not just a snap judgment.

Two cases in point:

Over the past few days, I could have picked up and passed along any of several seemingly authoritative reports from various Windows rumor sites that a new interim build of Windows Vista was going to be released to beta testers today. (No links necessary. If you follow this stuff, you already know who I’m talking about.) One site went so far as to post the exact time when build 5365 was due to be released – 1:00 PM EST – along with a list of the changes included in it.

They were wrong. In fact, I think they were pulling this stuff out of their … Sorry, let me start over. I think they were just guessing, and if a new build had appeared today within a few hours of their prediction, they could find a good excuse for the discrepancy in timing and claim a scoop. Instead, they just look silly. As do the many sites that reprinted that bogus prediction. If I had followed the herd and posted a link to one of those sites, I would have been guilty of passing along suspect information without checking it out, and you would have had every right to drop your estimation of how trustworthy and reliable I am. Glad I passed.

Now, I am reasonably certain that a new build of Windows Vista will be available for technical beta testers in the next couple of days. In fact, I’ve been cleaning out partitions and rearranging data files for the past three days in preparation for that new build. I’ll let you know when it’s here, and I’ll pass along some screen shots.

Example #2: Remember that Windows Vista Product Guide that briefly appeared on a Microsoft-affiliated website last week before being unceremoniously yanked? I was able to download it in the brief window during which it was available. Over the weekend, I picked some interesting details out of the product matrix at the front of the document, details I haven’t seen published anywhere else.

You can read the first of two parts summarizing my findings at Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report over at ZDNet. (I should have the second part ready tomorrow.)

And as soon as I can whip the HTML into shape, I’ll have a few tables summarizing the differences between different Windows versions, which will be posted right here.

Sometimes the technical press and blogosphere have a short attention span. They swarm over a story when it’s hot, and then move on to the next hot topic within a few hours or days. Sometimes it pays to wait a week or two and see what the real story is.