Windows Test Manager Paul Donnelly just sent the mail below to Beta testers at connect.microsoft.com, and I was so fascinated with the maps he's generated representing where Windows Beta testers are located, I thought I'd share it with you:

I'm sure you've noticed people here in the newsgroups from all over the globe.  When we put this program together one of our goals is diversity that closely mirrors that of our customers as much as possible.  We've hit all our targets and have a truly global program.  I realize only a fraction of people are active in the newsgroups and you never get to interact with and learn about most testers. The below will help you get an idea of where we get feedback from and where Windows Vista is being tested.  The below represents just the Technical Beta Program and is current as of 2 weeks ago.

 

Interesting facts:

    • We have approximately 30,000 Vista Beta testers in this program now.
    • There are Windows Vista beta testers in 125 countries.
    • We have testers in all 50 U.S. States, Puerto Rico, Guam and several other U.S. locations.
    • Exactly 50% of our testers are somewhere other than the U.S.
    • The northernmost person appears to be in Fairbanks, Alaska at 64.85 degrees N. latitude though it's a close call with a person in Iceland.
    • The southernmost person appears to be in the Kerguelen Islands at 49.56 degrees S latitude.
    • We have 1 person on the island of Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands.
    • We also have a person in the Tuamoto archipelago which is almost exactly half-way between South America and Australia.
    • If we had someone in the Yukon and someone in Labrador/Newfoundland we would have all Canadian provinces and territories represented.
    • In the U.S. we have testers in over 6,000 zip codes, or well over 10% of all zip codes in the U.S.

Notes:

    • We do not have street address granularity in some parts of the world.  In that case pushpins appear at the postal code, city or province levels and all testers in that set will cluster at 1 pushpin.
    • There is a roughly 15% failure rate for pushpin creation due to the complexities of matching addresses globally.
    • I kept most [map images] at 1024x768 but a couple are larger for more detail.
    • I created these using Microsoft MapPoint 2006.  You can find more info here.

View of the World

 

North America

Canada - West

Canada - East

 

United States

United States - Atlantic States

United States - Midwest

United States - North Central

United States - Northeast

United States - Pacific Northwest

United States - South Central

United States - Southeast

United States - Southwest

United States - Alaska

United States - Hawaii

 

Europe

Europe

Benelux and Germany

UK

Scandinavia

 

Asia

China

Japan and Korea

 

Down under:

Australia

New Zealand

 

Other Areas:

Pacific Ocean

Caribbean

Central America

South America

Middle East

Africa

It's pretty cool to see that we've got so much of the world represented by our testers!