Microsoft Sued Over Vista Marketing

daviddennis writes "According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a lawsuit alleges that Microsoft engaged in deceptive practices by letting PC makers promote hardware as 'Windows Vista Capable' even though they knew it could not run most of Vista's widely-promoted features. Microsoft responds by saying that the differences have been promoted with one of the most extensive marketing pushes in company history. 'In sum, Microsoft engaged in bait and switch -- assuring consumers they were purchasing Vista Capable machines when, in fact, they could obtain only a stripped-down operating system lacking the functionality and features that Microsoft advertised as Vista ... As a result, the suit said, people were buying machines that couldn't run the real Vista.'"

Comments

Gates is on the hook too

[ktappe]

The suit also alleges that Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates contributed to the company's "deceptive marketing" during a Jan. 29 appearance on the "Today" show, when he said that PC users could upgrade to Windows Vista for less than $100. "In fact, one can only 'upgrade' to Home Basic for that price, which Mr. Gates and Microsoft know is a product that lacks the features marketed by Microsoft as being Vista," the suit said.

It would be interesting to see Bill get deposed on this one. My main question is how long will it take for this to get to court. Class actions are notoriously slow-moving cases. By the time they get there, nobody will care. And any settlement, if history repeats itself, will just be a $50 certificate applicable to the cost of the next version of Windows.

Now that idea has merit

[Moraelin]

Uh, the only 'feature' less powerful PC's won't be able to take advantage of is the eye candy...big fucking deal...I suppose they're going to go after game makers too for all the games where machines meet the recommended requirements but can't run the games with everything maxed out?

You know, now that you mention it, going after the game makers has merits.

No, I'm not saying it should run with everything _maxxed_. But I can think of games which are anywhere from completely unplayable (as in, crash), to a slideshow, to having to be downgraded to a pityful joke, on machines which meet the minimum advertised specs. Sometimes even on machines which meet the _recommended_ specs. And that I don't really find ok.

I can think of games which were launched with some advertised spec, but then some mandatory patch turned them into a graphics orgy that outright crashes the game or machine of someone who did previously meet the specs. One example is COH. When the graphics upgrade happened that put COH graphics on par with COV. I know at least one person whose (admittedly crap) laptop started to just crash to desktop when that graphics update hit. In spite of having previously been perfectly good to play COH, and still being perfectly good to play WoW. (And, you know, because it's a MMO you can't refuse to install a patch.)

I can think of games which were hyped for their supposed great graphics, except _no_ machine at the time of release could actually display the advertised graphics as more than a frame per second. (E.g., EQ2. It was launched at a time when the 9800 passed for the top end graphics card, and sorry, it wasn't anywhere near enough to play other than at a massively reduced graphics quality. And by massively reduced, I mean that even at a point blank range all detail on a piece of armour was turned into a blurred smear.) I'm sorry, I know that not all machines are created equal, but if _no_ computer exists at the time which can actually display those graphics, then don't fucking advertise it with the max quality screenshots.

Briefly, some truth in avertising would be a welcome change with the game publishers too, you know? Those specs on the box are rarely more than a joke pulled out of the ass by marketting. It has nothing to do with what computers run the game adequately, it just has to do with how big a slice of the market does the marketting department want to market to.

Re:1 GB RAM is the minimum for windows

[PopeRatzo]

at its core (you know, the new driver model, dx10, etc) its only a little bigger than its predecessor.

Exactly. The fact that Vista is ANY bigger than its predecessor tells me everything I need to know about it. Do you think Microsoft is serving customer demands when it makes each successive operating system bigger and requiring more resources? Do you think customers are demanding that a computer should slow down just because you upgraded your operating system?

I've got a brand new PC that's right in the sweet spot for Vista performance. Yet, Windows XP runs faster and better on it than Vista. So how can anyone possibly say that Vista is "better"?

The entire PC industry is so tied to Microsoft that they don't have to even pretend to make each operating system better than the one before. All they have to do is get the PC makers to sign contracts saying that they'll put Windows on all of their new computers. Then, they sell big organizations on the idea that they need the latest software, which requires the latest OS, which requires a faster computer.

Net benefit to consumers? Negative. We are the consumables.

DX10

[Nom du Keyboard]

Consiering that Vista is really based on DirectX 10 graphics, and the only card that pretends to have it (Nvidia G8800) has virtually unusable Vista drivers, can any system claim to be full Vista Ready?

Re:1 GB RAM is the minimum for windows

[SL Baur]

So by your definition every single OS that comes out should use less resources than it's predecessor? I think that's generally a fair assessment for any piece of software. Smaller, faster and the feature set should be designed such that the user can make things go away that he doesn't need. Doable if you have capable programmers as in the XEmacs development community.

Re:1 GB RAM is the minimum for windows

[Weh]

maybe they have slightly, compare the fuel consumption of an entry level vw golf for example;


1974 golf fuel consumption
petrol (1093 cc, 750 kg) 8.5l/100km
diesel (1588 cc, 820 kg) 6.7 l/100km

2003 golf fuel consumption
petrol (1390 cc, 1164 kg) 6.8 l/100km
diesel (1588 cc, 1227 kg) 5.3 l/100km


The consumption has gone down a bit but in more than 30 years you'd expect a bit more.