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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."
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.
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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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!).