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Microsoft Internal Emails Show Dismay With Vista
bfwebster writes "Microsoft is currently facing a class-action suit over its designation of allegedly under-powered hardware as being 'Vista Capable.' The discovery process of that lawsuit has now compelled Microsoft to produce some internal emails discussing those issues. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has published extracts of some of those emails, along with a link to a a PDF file containing a more extensive email exchange. The emails reflect a lot of frustration among senior Microsoft personnel about Vista's performance problems and hardware incompatibilities. They also appear to indicate that Microsoft lowered the hardware requirements for 'Vista Capable' in order to include certain lower-end Intel chipsets, apparently as a favor to Intel: 'In the end, we lowered the requirement to help Intel make their quarterly earnings so they could continue to sell motherboards with 915 graphics embedded.' Read the whole PDF; it is informative, interesting, and at times (unintentionally) funny."
Don't by so short sighted.
It's not about making a decision based on profit, it is about a decision to deceive and lie to make a profit. Big difference.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Are they going to reimburse me for buying extra RAM for my daughter's new Toshiba laptop that had 512 MB of RAM with Vista, officially offered for sale at a store that way, but with 64 MB of it reserved for video RAM, leaving the system with a whopping 448 MB of RAM? And it takes about 10 minutes to start up because the HDD is running virtually nonstop, thrashing as it pages in the minimal amount of stuff needed? And opening a web page or a simple program takes almost as long, for the same reason?
Someone decided that was a valid, acceptable configuration for a Windows Vista machine.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Microsoft dropped the ball on this one. It is not a Bob, or ME situation, with a strong alternative sitting in the wings. This time, they bet the farm, and now have a lot of crow to eat.
What saddens me is that I want to like Vista, but I can't. My sister loves it, but to get to run it she has now 8x the PC that I do (Athlon64 x2 vs my ancient Socket-A Sempron), and I still crunch her into the ground for performance in many cases. Microsoft has managed to become the victim of it's own success, I believe. They worked on the premise that hardware would progress faster than it did, but people have hit the point of "good enough." More and more I don't see people upgrading their PC's. I used to pick up used machines easily that were just 2-3 years old. Now, this Sempron 2800 is the last one I got this way, and I've had it for years. People just aren't upgrading. Bodes poorly for Vista.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
I wonder if AMD can use this in a lawsuit of their own due to anti-competitive practices (On the other hand, it would be burning a bridge with the largest OS manufacturer, but since Intel appears to be getting preferential treatment, there may be something much more sinister below the surface). Not only that, but shouldn't Microsoft's shareholders be kinda ticked? By allowing this to happen, Microsoft opened the door to this lawsuit (something that will not help their investors), while helping out another companies investors, which it would appear was not in Microsoft's investors best interest.
I just read their internal emails and it appears that they changed the drivers required for Vista such that due to new DRM A/V requirements in Vista, most existing drivers were made inoperable and, in many cases, would never be fixed. They then colluded with Intel to say that machines based on the 915 chipset were sufficient to run the OS so that Intel would have good quarterly results.
To summarize, they just don't care about the customer. At no point do the emails indicate them making any decisions based on what's best for their customers. It makes it pretty obvious why Vista has been such a failure so far. They can't even get the service pack right.
I'm not big on the idea of predicting corporate downfalls but you really have to wonder whether a company that makes such incredibly bad decisions is long for this world.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
3 and 2 GHz procs and 1 and 2 Gigs of RAM are minimal HW!? I run Leopard happily on a 1 GHz eMac at home and Tiger on a 450 Mhz G3 tower at work both with 768 MB of RAM. FreeBSD and XP run great on a 750 MHz PC with 512 MB RAM at work as well.
Call me a troll or flamer. But come on, even tho I know you are very possible trying to be funny and serious at the same time. But not everything is fixable with *nix or OSX. People look into upgrading their Windows system to a more secure Windows. Not totally changing platform. So please stop suggesting other OS. I have checked out Linux (and I do like it) but some times I just have to log into Windows to get some stuff done right. No OS is the magic wand.
While you may be correct that the best reason to upgrade to Vista is the improved security, that was clearly not how the product was primarily advertised to the general public. People were shown ads with amazing Aero eye-candy, and told that Vista was the way to get it. When purchasing a computer that says "Vista capable," it's a reasonable assumption for a non-technical user (to which those ads were targeted) that buying a "Vista capable" computer will deliver the most prominently advertised feature of Vista. I'm not saying it's a bulletproof case, because the small print was there, but it's rather self-contradictory to advertise Windows Vista as being easier than ever for novice users, but also expecting same novice users to understand the system requirements of a GUI that is an optional component of an OS.
"Consuming Internet bandwidth since 1991."
3 things about computers: they're alive, they're self-aware, and they hate your guts.
Reducing a 90% player to 50% will greatly improve competition and innovation in the market, which is what we all want. Microsoft have been "getting by" based on corruption for years now, with minimal value added to their operating system, browser, office suite... while other systems have had to waste seemingly infinite man-hours supporting Microsoft's deliberately difficult proprietary file formats, file systems and network protocols, all while making time to innovate and advance.
With the waste of time down, and mindshare up, Linux and similar systems in its space will rise to great heights and Microsoft will have to actually make good products to remain relevant. That means we get multiple great operating systems rather than the prolonged battle between highly compromising systems we have now.
Sam ty sig.