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Microsoft Had Doubts About the 'Vista Capable' Label
dionysus writes "Last April, Microsoft was sued over its 'Vista Capable' labeling, and in hearing last week, attorneys for the plaintiffs presented evidence that Microsoft employees were skeptical about the 'Vista Capable' marketing. Some of the most damning evidence comes from Microsoft executives: 'Mike Nash, currently a corporate vice president for Windows product management, wrote in an e-mail, "I PERSONALLY got burnt ... Are we seeing this from a lot of customers? ... I now have a $2,100 e-mail machine." Jim Allchin, then the co-president of Microsoft's Platforms and Services Division, wrote in another e-mail, "We really botched this ... You guys have to do a better job with our customers."' The judge in the case is currently considering the plaintiffs' request to make it a class-action lawsuit."
It makes me feel really good to hear about Microsoft getting pissed at Microsoft. I've always wondered about this and what a relief. The frustration I've run into over the years, especially regarding design decisions, finally feels worth something.
Shoot, the Compaq I have which _shipped_ with Vista Home Premium is barely "Vista Capable" in any real sense... what on earth would possess them BESIDES marketing logic over engineers to claim anything less to be "Vista Capable"?
Anyone inside the project teams on the vista push knew many of the work patterns were B-A-D. teams had a top-down requirement change almost daily. they fought for changes via up-one-flagpole-down-another. The schedule cut all kinds of scope while the new features were "must haves". the security initiative, the team patterns, the scope dictation and the requirements "volleyball" were terrible at ever "finishing" a concept. Each team with any kind of pull would demand all others conform to the request they wanted, and the winning concept were decided in the mgmt level, not knowing the real impact of their decisions until afterwards.
Add in ideas that nobody had really tackled before, like the secure channel for content, driver signing, legacy app security rights vs. UAC, etc and you're bound to have a lot of latent problems that demand a longer period of testing. But this was after the 1st "scrap" so there really wasn't time to push the market off any longer, MS's ability to deliver was already in question.
it had many flavors of dysfunctional. but they've changed a lot and are starting differently with the next gen OS.
Exactly. What the exec said in his email was what an exec should be saying. "This didn't work for me... is this impacting our customers?"
No doubt corporate leadership caused the problem in the first place... but people pointing out the issues internally are what are needed to fix it. (Well, it can't be fixed, now. Maybe it can be avoided in the future.)
Home Basic also does not include the Aero Glass UI, tablet PC support, Mobility Center, Meeting Space, SideShow, or Scheduled Backup. In addition to the ability to join a domain, Business and Ultimate include Complete PC Backup and Restore, Fax and Scan, Remote Desktop, and the ability to save your password when connecting to an SMB share. That's right, in Home Basic/Premium, the "save password" checkbox on the authentication dialog is missing (and command-line alternatives are broken). Finally, only Ultimate Edition includes BitLocker drive encryption.
I can understand why they might want to have two editions of the OS: Home and Professional, like they had originally with XP. The networking capabilities of Business/Ultimate really are integrated into the OS and can't be added on by a separate package. Plenty of small business users need these features, but they order new PCs for their employees without realizing which flavor of Windows is included, so they wind up buying an extra copy at retail, which makes Microsoft more money. It's evil, but from a business perspective it makes sense.
However, apart from Media Center, the features of Home Premium over Home Basic are things nobody would ever pay extra for. It makes absolutely no sense to me that Media Center should require its own OS version. Media Center should be a separate product, just as Microsoft Office is a separate product. Advertise PCs that bundle it as having "Windows Vista Home Edition with Media Center" instead of "Windows Vista Home Premium Edition". Let customers who bought PCs without Media Center go buy it, just like customers who bought PCs without Office can go buy it. Media Center is something that a lot of people do see value in and are willing to pay for. Let them do that.
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Heres and interesting quote over at Ars Technica:
One thing is certain: the choice to have many editions of Vista differentiated sometimes by key features is causing Microsoft quite a bit of trouble. Had Microsoft enabled or disabled features like Aero Glass based on a machine's capabilities rather than the version of the OS in use, this suit would have likely been avoided.
So basically if they had based a machines capabilities at run-time based on it's hardware they wouldn't have been culpable but because it was done through marketing they may have mislead consumers.
Shh.
Taking people's icons away and forcing them to use the start menu confuses users.
I don't like many icons on the desktop. Even still, its easy to turn them back on.
Changing the names and locations of things with every new version so people have to learn all over again is an ordeal.
My Documents has been "My Documents" from Win95 until Vista. Now its simply called Documents. Ya, big stretch.
Internet Explorer 7 took away "History" unless you want to clutter up your screen with an explorer bar. Where did the history pull-down go.
Click the star icon. The explorer bar opens temporarly. Click History. Ya, difficult.
Parents want to check up on where their kids have been surfing. Why the hell would they take a feature away?
What feature was taken away? Nevermind that Vista includes Parental Controls.
It boggles the mind! Microsoft has made computing more complicated and confusing for the average user at every turn when they need to make it simpler. It is a shame they are still in business.
I've found it much easier. What's your answer? Linux I suppose? Or Apple, which is the lock-in leader in the computing industry?
PXE boot install to a Dell Latitude D400 with no optical drive.....worked like magic, no tweaks needed (which is good because that really isn't my cup of tea)....the PXE boot worked based on steps straight off of some guys blog (http://hugi.to/blog/archive/2006/12/23/ubuntu-pxe-install-via-windows). Not bad for a free laptop that's several years old and won't install XP even though that was what was on there (no optical drive, won't install from the floppies). The laptop was free because the previous owner couldn't get XP back on....lucky me.
Layne
I was sysadmin for the Ad company that had the Microsoft account in the UK.
One of the things I was asked was 'Will it run inside these specs', which I think was 2MB RAM, and not much disk at all..
The answer I gave was that yes it would, if you left it to boot up for a good 10 minutes, and didn't want to run any applications on top of it. Or install anything else either.
The resounding answer to that was "Great, we CAN advertise that it'll run on those specs". Even if I point blank told them it'd be useless, and to never advocate running it like that.
The point is that Advertising is all about pushing how far you can bend the truth (or lack of it) without crossing the line of blatant lying that'll get you sued or fined.
The "Vista Ready" sticker is an advertising token as much as anything. Yes, you can install Vista on it. Yes, it'll run Vista. Doesn't say anything about doing anything else with it (hey, it never said it'd run the latest greatest game, or even load your word processor!).
Everyone is making the assumption that Microsoft was in the driver's seat on this one. Microsoft has two major constituencies - The end user, and the OEMs.
I have a funny feeling that may bare out upon farther investigation, that it was the computer manufacturers that demanded the "Vista Capable" designation. After all, they have to keep foisting those 512MB Celeron machines on the store shelves of Walmat and Target on someone. We also know that those machines targeting the price sensitive consumer are targeting are simply not adequate.
What I will take Microsoft to task over is caving in to the OEMs.
This is a boring sig
If you install stock Windows (not a recovery disc) to a laptop, you can easily run into the same problems
Mod parent up, he's spot on on this one. Having had to rescue many a PC or laptop whose rescue disk or partition has gone by bye bye means lots of things not working properly, and a long tedious hunt for drivers, of which only about 75% will work. For the rest, you'll find yourself poring over reams of forum posts to find the magical workaround to finish the last few.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
I'm fully capable of buying a new graphics card and installing it in my windows machine, and it runs all nice and shiny.. heck, I've even formatted and reinstalled windows in the past. But install something by hand? Text mode? Now my eyes are glazing over.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
The problem is mostly likely caused by the fact that Ubuntu tries to use the nv (open source) Nvidia driver for their card, which was too new and not supported. Their problem is not typical and may have, in fact, been fixed by now (though I don't know). I've seen people with Windows boxes who get a black screen after boot because of a problem with the drivers as well. I don't believe the Ubuntu fix (boot into recovery mode, edit one line in a file, reboot, install new driver) is much harder then the Windows fix (boot into safe-mode, remove the driver, reboot, install new driver). The proprietary drivers from the Ubuntu repository should work fine, btw, beta drivers are optional (many people would use them in Windows too, rather than the Vendor supplied version). If someone is a power user of Linux or Windows they'll have no problem doing these things. If not, in both cases they'll most likely call someone or follow some simple instructions on the net.
On the other hand, my X-fi still doesn't have 32bit Linux support at all. Additionally my Ubuntu install has repeatedly changed my menu.lst to point to the wrong hard drive for boot. I don't even want to get into the headache that is Nvidia's driver for enabling dual display.
But more on topic, none of my PC is "certified for Vista" yet Vista runs quite well on it. Microsoft's upgrade tool tells me that I'd have problems running it, even though I don't. But just for the record I only ran the beta of Vista and I have felt no need to change from XP. I != fanboy