Epic Fail
No really, there's this game - some might know it - called World of Warcraft. It is approaching 12 million subscribers. And just recently an expansion pack came out, which most of these people bought as soon as they could, the little addicts they are. And guess what, the servers actually stood the throng of people logging on at the same time. (I know this, because I was there on release day in Borean Tundra, the little addict I am.)
Now the creators of WoW might want to lend a hand to Microsoft. Because the so-called web launch of the public beta of Windows 7 was a fail of epic proportions. One would think that a company with a budget that of a medium country's could pull something off like this. But no, the servers hosting the beta sunk like a handleless hammer only to rise up again in a solid half a day. (I know this because I refreshed the error 403 a few times out of sheer curiosity.)
Also, a little while ago smart people have invited this truly great program called BitTorrent. It basically lets the users' computers do the heavy lifting instead of one file server crumbling under the load. Successful operating systems are distributed on it, like linux. Just saying.
Of course there's no such software as a Microsoft BitTorrent®, maybe that's the problem.