Microsoft Worried OEM 'Craplets' Will Harm Vista

elsilver writes "An article at the CBC indicates that Microsoft is worried that the assorted crap most OEM companies load onto a new machine may affect users' opinion of Vista. An unnamed executive is concerned that the user will conclude the instability of the non-MS-certified applications is Vista's fault. Is this a serious concern, or is MS trying to bully OEMs into only including Vista-certified apps? As for the OEMs, one "removed older DVD-writing software they found was incompatible and replaced it with Vista's own software." — do they get points for realizing it was both buggy AND redundant?"

Comments

My guess

[Anonymous Coward]

My guess: the era of pre-loading software and packing computers with shit as an "added bonus" is over. Most people know the things they like and they have internet access to download them. This was not true 10 years ago -- you wanted burning software with your cd burner, media player software for your camera, etc. But now these apps just mess everything up.

A company like apple, which monopolises the whole process to fit with their brand, is in a better position here. I mean, from a marketing perspective, all it takes is one lousy OEM company to install buggy shit on their computers and you can ruin the Vista brand.

Re:My guess

[Lumpy]

The feeling of the user will be: Vista sucks, and I paid 2000$ and my machine is slow like a dog because of Vista. Natural feeling.

Problem is that the customer is RIGHT in that statement. I am demoing Vista here at the office because the Boss wants us to test it as many of our customers are the "oooooh new shiney!" type.

I am running it in slow hardware... Pentium 4 3.2ghz 1gig ram and SATA drives.

and it is in fact SLOW AS A DOG compared to XP.... Yes, I only have a low end Nvidia 6600GT video card with 256 meg of ram, so that might be the problem as well.

But the honest truth is that Vista is very slow compared to XP. if I turn off all the crap it gets better but most people wont turn off the crap because the difference between vista and XP disappears.

And that is what customers want... Purdy shiney flashey! they do not give a rats ass about anything they cant see and feel.

Good!

[HugePedlar]

I'm sick of buying laptops, particularly for work, which come with bundles of shit preinstalled. It enrages me more when they won't even provide a proper Windows install CD so I can wipe and clean-install. Anything that spells the end of this policy is welcome.

Understandable

[Saxmachine]

Having gone through several prefab Windows boxes in my time (Gateway, Dell, Sony mostly), it seems to me that the volume of crap applications that come pre-loaded and all of which run at startup time has increased dramatically, to the point that the first thing I have to do with any new brand-name PC is either uninstall all the bloat one-by-one or else wipe the drive and start from scratch with a fresh OS install. For a desktop PC, I can understand everyone telling me "build your own, then it will only have what you want on it." Fair enough. But what about portables? Is there a good laptop manufacturer who will sell me a "blank slate" laptop? Ordinarily, I would expect this sort of performance-hindering bloat to reflect badly on the manufacturer. I think MS is right to be worried that the PC makers might jump at the chance to shift the blame onto the new OS, rightly or wrongly.

Yes

[The MAZZTer]

My computer came with XP and a preinstalled keyboard shortcut program. This program had the nasty side effect of crashing ANY fullscreen app that tried to launch, with the single exception of Jedi Outcast.

At the time, none of these other games I had were designed with XP in mind, so I immediately assumed that XP's compatibility was abysmal and I was NOT happy. Fortunately I was able to correct the REAL problem soon enough.

I concur

[spineboy]

A logical extension of Microsofts argument would be that NO outside software can be trusted, unless you pay the special fee to MSoft so that it's "certified", otherwise they'll refuse to take the blame for anything. That just reaffirms my belief in the parent posts argument, that it's the OSs fault.

Those Craplets are the keys to Microsoft's success

[Anonymous Coward]

I worked for one of the leading crippleware-pre-installed-on-Windows companies that pre-installed software on something north of 80% of windows OEM computer out there.

We payed the OEMs handsomely for the privilige of reducing the functionality of our software - both in discounts and in revenue-share kickbacks for upgrades.

I'm pretty certain the money the OEMs makes from this crippleware *MORE* than pays for the cost of Windows (especially the discounted OEM windows) - and is the #1 reason HP, Dell, etc like Windows over Linux.

Get rid of the paid-for-crippleware, and OEMs will jump to Linux very quickly.

Re:It IS Vista's fault

[TheRaven64]

On every BSD system I've used, there is a per-user process limit that is lower than the total process limit. This means that a fork bomb will only affect the user who runs it. Someone with root privileges can still log in and run pkill/killall.

Actually, this is a real problem on OS X. A load of sysctls haven't been tweaked since the NeXT days, and the default limit is 100 processes per uid. If you've got a few terminals open then it's very easy to hit this limit, and once you do it's pretty much impossible to do anything unless you can ssh in as another user (I miss virtual terminals on OS X). Mind you, it's much easier to kill OS X by simply allocating a load of memory a page at a time. Hopefully Leopard will include a less broken VM subsystem, but I'm not holding my breath.

Re:Craplets?

[derEikopf]

For $10 Dell will include a reinstallation CD. I always get them for my clients and the absolute first step in setting up a new Dell is a reformat/reinstall.

Re:Craplets?

[drinkypoo]

FWIW my HP Compaq nw9440 "mobile workstation" machine didn't come with a bunch of crap. It had the stuff to support the hardware, norton internet security, and that's it. I removed norton internet security of course, as it is a festering pile of flaming dragon shit, and everything has been pretty much fine since. The lower-grade machine you buy the more shit they put on it because they get money for giving you that pile of crap. On a higher-end machine they don't want to offend you.