"Vista Capable" Lawsuit Is Now a Class Action

An anonymous reader notes an update in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporting that the lawsuit against Microsoft's "Windows Vista Capable" marketing campaign has been granted class-action status. We discussed the company's internal misgivings with this campaign a while back. The suit alleges that "...Microsoft unjustly enriched itself by promoting PCs as 'Windows Vista Capable' even when they could only run a bare-bones version of the operating system, called 'Vista Home Basic.'" In the 2006 pre-holiday season, Microsoft had placed "Windows Vista Capable" stickers on machines to keep the sale of Windows XP machines going after Vista was delayed. Microsoft didn't lose out totally in the recent ruling — the article notes that the judge "narrowed the basis on which plaintiffs could move forward with their claims."

Comments

Re:Ugh...

[jtownatpunk.net]

I guess you don't understand the purpose of a class action. The purpose is never to benefit the consumer. The purpose is to punish the target of the class action. That is a valid purpose in a situation like this where the individual losses of the consumer were negligible but, in aggregate, add up to a significant amount.

No reasonable person is going to file an individual lawsuit against Microsoft because of this because the amount of money they could recover (if they win) is less than the value of the time it would take to file in small claims court, prepare the evidence, take a day off work...heck, it's not even worth the effort of typing it all out. But does that mean Microsoft should be off the hook? No. That's where the class action comes in.

Re:Ugh...

[MikeyVB]

E. Revoke their charter of incorporation.

I bet they would start to get the point after the first few.

Re:MS selling hardware?

[asd-Strom]

Well, 2k is faster than Vista because it has a lot less features. If you don't use any of those features, then sure, ok you can stick with the older stuff. But I personally benefit from Vista features and thus I'm also using Vista.

Re:Vista Capable, not version specific

[jawtheshark]

Well, that's just shows that the problem is their version policy, isn't it? The fact that "Vista" is an encompassing brandname for a whole bunch of different OSes with different capabilities makes it extremely hard to say what "Vista" is. As anyone, I'd expect it to meet the requirements to run "Vista Ultimate" with everything on, because it's "Vista".

Okay, so it is slightly under-handed to make people expect Aero when they're going to get core Vista, but that's just marketing.

It's not "just marketing", it is plainly misleading... that's the whole problem. I run Linux on mine anyway, and that was the reason I bought it. The sticker to me meant, "Cheap computer where I can run Linux on". ;-)

Re:Ridiculous.

[Xelios]

Instead they're selling half a dozen or more version of Vista where eye candy is an option - more so in some than others.

Not quite, only the most expensive versions have the eye candy as an option. And that's the problem. You pay more specifically for the eye candy then aren't able to run it on your Vista Capable machine.

And that doesn't hint at anything? TBH I wouldn't expect my new £50,000 sports car to run well at all on the £60 each cheap tyres I bought for my Fiat Punto.

No, it doesn't hint at anything, certainly not in the way your analogy makes it seem. Microsoft has a history of charging more for versions that can do more, but in the past it's had nothing to do with computer specifications. XP Pro will run just as well on a computer that supports XP Home.

Only if you take marketing at their word and assume (naively) that "capable" means "fully functional of everything" rather than taking the more normal meaning of "capable" which is "it can do it in some way". Capable has an implied undertone of "and not much more". Some of its synonyms imply more than a basic level, but I would always take capable to mean capable, not capable and exceeding the minimum.

I would too, but I still think it's a basis for a lawsuit, and obviously the judge in this case agrees. I just don't think they'll win, for the reason you mentioned.