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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.'"
1 GB ram is the minimum for a responsive experience with windows .. especially with the required anti-virus running.
The should start off at 1GB. PC makers lose credibility selling systems with less than that because the experience is going to suck.
Vista Home Basic includes the "core experience," which means Microsoft admits that the rest is useless window dressing.
Hey... which version comes without the DRM feature?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
The fact is that the vast majority of users don't need a hog like Vista for anything they don't already use XP for, making an incentive to upgrade almost nonexistent aside from having the latest Shiny New Thing(tm). Making Vista seem more attractive would be the only way to get grandma to pay $500 just to be able to send the same emails at the same speed.
I think that Microsoft is being wrongly sued in this, and I bet the suit will be thrown out quickly enough.
Basically, what it seems to be is a consumer thought that "Windows Vista Capable" meant that the computer would be able to do all the pretty things that Microsoft portrayed in ads.
To me, this is a little bit like suing because even after buying a bag of chocolate chips, you couldn't make cookies that look as nice as the ones on the package. Or even, for that matter, that even after buying an SUV, you are not suddenly scaling mountains in the wilderness.
I don't think that Microsoft was concealing anything. They were advertising a product with its niftiest features, but I think that about 15 minutes of research would have let someone know that they couldn't use the Aero interface. Microsoft used marketing and advertising to make their product look the best, that isn't the same as cheating someone.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
That's what happens when you market stripped down versions and feature full versions at the same time. It's like being promised a BMW and getting a Honda instead. Most average users don't understand all these differences and the sales person happily told them "Vista will run on it" to make a sale.
Microsoft may or may not win this one but regardless, the damage is done as far as end users are concerned.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
Can everyone please just stop suing everyone?
I am so sick of lawyers.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Look, I hate Windows.
...but the core of an OS is NOT the graphical fluff. They didn't mislead the customers with the "Vista Capable" stickers, the machine IS. If you applied this standard to -any- software it would be in trouble. Take games, for example. "Runs best on ATI"? "System Requirements"? If I ran most FPS games with the bare minimum, my gaming experience with them would be, say, about the same as the users buying stripped down PCs to run Vista. You don't buy a cheap 4-banger and expect a race car, and although the cheaper car can go 70mph, it's not going to feel as nice as a Ferrari doing the same thing.
I run Linux exclusively and in general throw punches at Microsoft when they're valid.....
This one, but it's not done yet.
A recently helped my girlfriends uncle buy a new laptop since he's on the road a lot. We went the normal consumer route and went around town looking for the best deal. As a big Toshiba fan I kept my eye on those. To my surprise everywhere we went offered ONLY vista installed. Problem being when we took the machine home and booted, the machine is dead slow. It's a 2ghz machine with 1gig memory. (Not bad I run my own desktop with less, though I run linux) Just to boot this thing takes 5-10 minutes, and the user experience just blows. I dont blame Toshiba as I've seen and used many of their laptops and never had a problem. Just wish they would let you have XP instead of Vista if you wanted.
I bought a monitor that has a "Works with Windows Vista" sticker on it but my Packard Bell still isn't cooperating.
There is another aspect that the lawsuit is most likely going to cover and that is the crippling DRM built into the system. You have people buying supposed HD-ready machines with HD-DVD players and a nice big screen HD Screen and they plug it all up, put in a HD-DVD and...lookie..nothing. If I were to buy a big "Vista Ready" system that one of its main features is to play HD content, and then I find that Vista won't allow it, I would sue too.
I'm all for making Microsoft follow the rules, but at what point does this cross the line from "buyer beware" to "deceptive advertising"?
Car analogy time!
Car companies use phrases like "starting at $22,900" all the time in their commercials, when we know damn well that if you want power windows, A/C, a CD player, and a decent sized engine, you will be paying significantly more than that price. The "starting at" price is always the most basic model. I don't see any difference between this and advertising "Windows Vista Capable" and only being able to run basic version of Windows Vista. The computer is, in fact, capable of running Windows Vista.
"But wait!" TFA exclaims. "It can't run ALL of Vista, at least not all the features that Microsoft advertised as being in Vista!"
So? That same car commercial has the car making hairpin mountain pass turns at 65 miles an hour, probably with custom tires, a beefy engine, and a specially trained driver. Do those things come with the $22,900 car? Certainly not. Why then are these same people not filing suits about the Ford Edge not being able to climb buildings and park on walls?
I can't see this suit going anywhere. There is a fine line between letting a company advertise their products and forcing them to tell everyone how shitty their stuff is, and this suit crosses it.
For security, the MD5 hash of this message and sig is 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.
Is there such a thing as a reverse class-action suit? 'Cause if they're going to sue M$ for this, then they need to include the developers of every PC game ever made!
Everyone knows that trying to play a game on the minimum hardware is an excercise in frustration and futility. You need at least the recommended specs to run the game decently in most cases.
Even more to the point, modern games turn off resource-intensive features when running on older PCs; and since much of the hype around the latest FPS is centered on the advanced (read: resource-intensive) graphics, anyone playing "Half-Quake of Doom 37" on an older PC is missing much of the advertised experience. Micro$oft is simply copying the 3D game developers' design/business model, just as they copied the 3D idea itself.
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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Matters are further complicated by the fact that what Vista actually is, isn't what they marketed. At least not initially, when they were marketing the beta for apparent years before the actual release. WinFS? And all those other features that'd have made Vista functional? Yeah, they don't exist.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
The glass GUI is the least crucial part of Vista, just as it's irrelevant to the ability to operate the system and get things done if I remove Beryl and swap Metacity back in as my window mangler on Ubuntu.
If the little stickers had said "Vista 100% Eye Candy Ready" then you would have a point, but you don't, because they said "vista ready", and that's just one feature of Vista, and frankly it's the least important one. Not that there are ANY features of Vista which would compel me to upgrade.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Someone on Slashdot being modded down for slamming MS and praising Apple...
The WORLD IS COMING TO AN END!!!!!
REPENT SINNERS!
Sure, we can do that. Just as soon as we work out this whole "social interaction" thing among us humans of different temperaments, talents, and convictions.
Whether you like it or not, our legal system is a fairly good way to work out disagreements. Yes, it has it's flaws like any system. But, on the whole, it is far better than duking it out with guns, gangs, or otherwise. I would much rather hire an attorney than hire an army.
If you think America is violent NOW, imagine what it would be like without any "legal", state-recognized way to work out disagreements. Do you really want to be in a system where the biggest gun wins? You would stand absolutely no chance in a system like that.
The big problem is Microsoft is advertising Aero as Vista. They don't call it Aero in their ads, they say "Hey look what VISTA can do, this is pretty cool," then they show some fancy Aero glass eye candy. The logical conclusion most people would make is that what they are seeing IS Vista, therefore they would want to buy a Vista Capable computer to get all those fancy features. They do this and it isn't what they expected. Microsoft is intentionally misleading consumers.
Another big problem is that brand new computers should have absolutely no problem running a current operating system. Honestly, if you go into a store and buy a current model you should not have to worry about the responsiveness of the operating system!
Give it a rest. M$ is playing semantic word games with the words "Vista" and "Aero", not to mention crippling their software in various ways, in a deliberate attempt to deceive the consumer. Showing one thing and giving another. False advertising in other words.
They have along history of doing similar things. One reason they're disliked. This time they've been called on it. We'll see what the court says but at a bare minimum they should get their wrist slapped.
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Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion.
I actually agree with the general concepts here...
As anyone can tell from my posting history, I am quick to step in to correct wrong or ignornant comments about the NT architecture and the Slashdot myths of Vista, as most people really have very little technical understanding of either.
However, Vista Home 'Basic' should NEVER have existed. MS really screwed up here, they should have just made the Business version which doesn't install games and non business features by default and Vista Ultimate for home users. They could have moved their pricing model so that Ultimate was provided at the Home Premium price and not only made more money, but gave users more features and not caused the version confusion that exists.
Businesses usually get the need for a different version, and the Business version of Vista is a good idea as it doesn't install the 'toys' by default. However, home users should not be put in the position of choosing a version, especially when there are 3 versions for the Home Market.
(Home Basic = Vista Core without next gen Video subsystem enabled)
(Home Premium = Vista that meets the needs of 95% of the users) and
(Ultimate = The complete OS with both business domain features and all the home toys, and the toys that used to be part of the Plus Program.)
There is no reason the Ultimate License and the Business license couldn't have been available at a comparable price point, and just not screwed with the other versions.
This is the MS marketing and logic that I refer to as the Steve Ballmer side of thinking, something MS would never have done when he dind't have the control or his mindset in control of things like this.
I can almost understand Vista Home Premium, but Vista Home Basic truly denies users of most of the features that make Vista a true benefit over XP. Sure the kernel is optimized, the caching is brilliant, new audio, new network, the graphic subsystem sees some benefits even in Vista Home Basic, but by not including the accelerated features of the new GUI subsystem 'aka Aero/Glass' they are screwing users as this is a major performance gain even in desktop applications.
And don't forget gaming for DX10 that depends on the WDDM/Aero model. So in theory DX10 games running on Home Basic will probably fail, as DX10 expects the full GPU scheduling and GPU memory sharing that is what makes Vista a next generation OS for Gaming and Graphics.
Sadly one of the desgin goals and beauty of the NT code base was the unified structure for all classes of users and business from the home desktop to the massive servers, all sharing a common modular kernel and code base.
MS still has this, but their marketing and business idiots screw this up by disecting Vista into 5 versions for just the desktop. Why even keep a common code base, especially if you are going to turn off features in Home Basic that are 'architectural' in nature?
I hope MS loses and they re-consider the whole Vista versioning mess and at the very least pull Home Basic from ever being sold again.
Attention Everyone:
Anyone out there that is actually considering a new computer with Vista installed, DO NOT BUY a computer with anything less than Vista Home Premium installed. PERIOD.
Fortunately, most of the computers and laptops you find that have Vista preinstalled at places like BestBuy are using Vista Home Premimum.
It does seem the market has already spoken quite loudly about Home Basic and MFRs and retailers are getting the hint to not even bother with Home Basic already.
During the time the Vista Capable stickers were being initially promoted, no one I know knew that there would be something better called "Premium Ready" or the term "core experience". I bought Sony's most expensive notebook that was marked "Vista Capable" and it is too short on video ram to do the premium job. I'm screwed.