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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."
To sBallmer:
Steve, Why is it taking forever to send emails?
From sBallmer:
To bGates:
Bill, 640 minutes for roundtrip for email should be enough for everyone.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
"I'm just grateful I kept XP on this machine."
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
.. this shows that Microsoft are not misguided/stupid enough to genuinely believe Vista is a Good Operating System.. Let's hope they learn from these mistakes before Windows 7 comes out.
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
"I going to f---ing kill the 915 chipset!"
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.
First of all I think the 'Vista Capable' suit is ridiculous. Microsoft deserves to win that one, because I am well aware of what was on the shelf on the low to mid range during that time frame. And those machines should of been fine, I had Vista RTM up and running on my P3 1Ghz w/ GeForce 6600. And it ran with Aero, and was certainly 'capable' in classic.
However I can understand Microsoft's dismay at it's performance, for relatively little gain you are incurring tremendous performance hit's across the board. File transfer and gaming come to mind most quickly however. But during it's development cycle I got the impression they really had no idea what they wanted out of Vista, dropping key features over the years. And seemingly concentrating to hard on a 'shiny' UI, that although slick in some respects still feels like a mangled XP GUI, with simply a reworked folder system. And a much lauded search to run feature that should of simply been in XP SP3 to hold users over while something, smaller, better, faster, stronger was being developed.
But in the interests of full disclosure, I have Vista running in a VM... A couple more trips to newegg.com and I might finally install it, DirectX 10 is still exciting to me.
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
OK, I'm officially a Paranoid Conspiracy Theorist(tm).
I read the title as "Disney", not "Dismay".
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Click Start > Right Click 'Computer' > Advanced System Settings > Performance Settings > Adjust For Best Performance
Runs like a champ in a VM on my AM2 Sempron, with 512MB of memory allocated to it.
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
I have found that Windows server 2008 runs very well on a ~ 3 year old Dell 610 notebook, even when the system is locked into maximum battery life (and minimum performance) mode. It has a ~ 2GHz processor and 2 GBytes of RAM.
Playing graphics games costs CPU and GPU processing power. From my point of view, the reason to upgrade to Vista is its significantly higher security than XP, let alone the earlier OS's. Search is also very nice and quite useful.
The problem is that the OS is so badly designed and un-optimized that you can't run it on that kind of hardware. There isn't any good reason why Vista should have been slower than XP really, and fancy FX should have been turned on only on premium hardware. Many other OSes can do it after all. Leopard is doing just fine on a core 2 duo with GMA 950 GFX after all...
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'm running Vista Ultimate with Aero & dual monitors on an old 875 motherboard, 2.4Ghz Northwood, 1GB ram, Radeon 9600 AGP. No problems whatsoever and performance is fine for work apps (don't play games). I'm thinking of getting a couple of radeon 2400 cards (one AGP one PCI) so I can run three or four monitors.
Run and catch, run and catch, the lamb is caught in the blackberry patch.
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?
LOL @ Mike Nash's complaint that his $2100 Sony was an email-only machine because it had the Intel 915 chipset that can't run glass or movie maker. Mike Nash is the Corporate Vice President, Windows Product Management.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
When people are able to run Lord of the rings online in medium graphics level setting with a mid range graphics card, 1 Gb ram and Xp whereas getting almost the same performance with people on vista and high end gear, you can say that the latter os fails in performance.
and dont feed me the 'but those are games' bullshit. for, games and entertainment comprise almost half of the activity on computers, and even for business, only idiots would want to put vista on a client/standalone computer in the office, having the need to pour a few hundred bucks just for being able to run vista so that the computer is going to conduct the same work it did with xp.
on gaming front microsoft tried to push vista with the 'high performance' bullcrap to gamers with dx10. correcting - they FORCED it, and almost noone took it. now they have to oblige with nvidia's needs for putting dx10 capability for xp, because people are just evading not only vista, but high end graphics cards too, because they need dx10 to deliver the latest, but noone wants to take the vista sh@t just because of it.
sorry people. you in microsoft have utterly failed with vista, and you need to go back to drawing board, even, put on your thinking caps and reevaluate your approach to customer and their needs.
we are not the witless herd of the 90s anymore.
Read radical news here
That was always the gripe I had with integrated graphics chipsets. IGV take away the system memory and the OEM's "innocently" forget to do the subtraction when quoting the actual system memory in their marketing material.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
In case of performance issues, look! Over there!
Isn't that Britney checking into rehab?
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Dismay, when contacted, said she was not even in the country when the photo in question was taken. Vista could not be reached for comment, but her publisher insisted that all struggling new talent has photos in the closet that invariably surface when they become popular. When asked, the man-on-the-street responded with a shrug and said "Good thing neither of them has dentures - someone could have lost a labia!"
Microsoft's REAL error was actually retaining these email messages instead of following their "do-not-save-e-mail directive" and "30-Day E-Mail Destruction Rule", like they did to thwart previous lawsuits.
"Consuming Internet bandwidth since 1991."
Has anyone else noticed that Steve Ballmer barely ever uses punctuation?
Circumcision is child abuse.
Maybe it's a typo -- "runs like a chimp" brings to mind knuckle dragging with occasional inexplicable detours into incoherent bursts of rage and feces flinging.
My company just bought a dozen new machines. Before buying I checked with our vendor that provides one of our business software products and was told that since we use Samba on our servers, Vista can not work with Samba. So we bought XP and have had not a single issue.
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
It was confusing, all their partners showed that it would be.
All there commercials advertised Vista Ready stickers meant it was Vista ready and was shown with a computer running Aero.
The market clearly wasn't ready for it, but MS sure implied everything you have would work fine.
Knowing it wouldn't.
There where some people that wanted to advertise Vista Basic and Vista capable but MS decided against that.
No, they shoved a product that wasn't ready out the door, knew they where doing it and hoped customers wouldn't complain too much.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I'm fairly certain that most people are familiar with the idiom "like a champ" meaning; "to do something very well". Not quite sure what you are talking about though...
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
Microsoft got cheap. Instead of paying reluctant vendors to write Vista drivers for older hardware (supposedly this happened for Win95), they ended up turning Vista into a bitter pill. Case in point, I have an HP Photosmart 7350 printer that I bought in 2002. This printer is great because it was one of the last printers to not have HP's customer-friendly "your printer cartridge is too old so I won't print" mechanism. For a few months after Vista's release, HP kept saying that the printer was incompatible with Vista. Suddenly, the printer is compatible with the "HP Deskjet 5550" driver included with Vista. Huh? Of course, HP says that some features are unavailable, but doesn't say which ones...
Even Vista fanbois have to agree that hardware incompatibility/driver issues are the biggest problem with Vista. Microsoft's Vista Upgrade adviser, while offering great disclosure, doesn't help promote Vista. So that leaves people like me stuck between having perfectly useful hardware with no fully-functioning Vista driver (or no driver at all), and moving to Vista... So I'm sticking with XP.
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
I see Windows Update mentioned a lot in the PDF.
Has it ever had a third party driver on it? I've never seen one. I always assumed it was like Windows Media Player which always says "looking for a codec" then "codec not found" - even if it's the most common codec ever which is missing.
Microsoft could fix an awful lot of problems by making Windows Update actually do something useful. I don't know why they don't do it...
No sig today...
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.
One line said it all:
... Apple did not lose their way."
:)
"We really botched this."
You tie that together with his memo from 2004:
"I am not sure how the company lost sight of what matters to our customers (both business and home) the most, but in my view we lost our way. I think our teams lost sight of what bug-free means, what resilience means, what full scenarios mean, what security means, what performance means, how important current applications are, and really understanding what the most important problems [our] customers face are. I see lots of random features and some great vision, but that doesn't translate into great products.
I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft.
Anybody know if he's since switched to using a Mac?
Basically, it was practically unusable with Vista, pretty good with XP, and I've fallen in love with Linux on it. Especially multi-tasking. People can say whatever they want about KDE or Gnome being slow. And yeah, if you have any even slightly older hardware running either of those two DE's on default settings then, yes, it will seem a bit sluggish until you reign the eye candy in a bit. But, as one that keeps a large number of programs and virtual desktops, etc. going simultaneously, nothing can touch *nix for multi-tasking. It's just so smooth, it's utterly amazing. Since I've gotten going here and all, I'll also mention that I make extensive use of virtual machines. VMware never ran so smoothly on XP or Win2K for that matter. It feels seemless. You fullscreen your VM and put it into exclusive mode and you will forget that you aren't on the bare metal. With Windows there was always some little stutter or jerky mouse, or something that broke you out of the moment and reminded you that you were in a VM. Linux really is amazing. I can't speak for the BSD's since I don't have any experience but if they're anything like as good as Linux, Microsoft has something very serious to worry about in the long term.
And that's my 2 cents. Sorry for the rambling. I haven't had my coffee yet. Going now.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
512 is XP "barely adequate?" For what?
From what I have seen, for 98% of things in XP 512MB is enough on a properly configured system. I'd say for XP that 128mb is "barely adequate."
It really depends on what you're doing. Personally, I like to have 2GB or more, especially if we're talking Vista, but 512MB is XP is fine for everything but serious gaming or trying to burn a DVD while multitasking.
How much OS do you need to run a browser?
The OS is pretty much a moot point for most people now. Most everyone I know uses a PC to run a browser
and email. Sure they may use office or whatever occasionally but the browser and perhaps a email client
can just about get you anything you need.
Got Code?
Insightful? If the box says it will run Vista (or if the Vista box says it will run on 512mb) it should run Vista with 512mb or it's a classic bait and switch. And you shouldn't have to reconfigure anything or add any hardware, it should WORK. Speaking of which, my box at home has 512mb and it runs XP fine. Most of the time anyway; sometimes it has trouble booting, bluescreening and rebooting itself repeatedly.
I have better uses for my money (like paying my eye doctor, Dr. Odin) than buying yet more memory for a computer that worked fine with 98 and works fine with mandriva/KDE. If I were the guy who typed the GP post I'd be pissed too.
Did thieves just take over all corporations this century, or was I just not paying attention the first half century of my life? When did lying become acceptable?
Microsoft and its employees should stop making excuses for their piss-poor crapware and actually produce a quality product instead of the bloated buggy crap they shovel out the door these days. If I bought whole computers instead of building them from spare parts I'd buy a mac.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Cleary. There. Are. Some. Exceptions. To. This. Rule.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
I'm not sure if "they" meant MS employees writing drivers, or hardware vendors writing drivers. Either way, it seems MS has a credibility problem.
Also, the unsaid meaning of some of the emails is: recognizing that they failed to set a high enough priority to having the device drivers ready when Vista shipped.
It's not surprising that MS corporate brass had these discussions. You'd expect them to. What is surprising is that they failed at something so fundamental to the business of selling OSes.
To all the Microsoft apologists out there--this is your Waterloo. Here we have a concrete example of how Microsoft decided to do one of their corporate buddies a huge favor--letting them meet their f'n quarterly numbers. So, Microsoft chose to help one of their rich pals over every single one of their users. That should tell you who they value. And the common perception that Vista is a piece of crap? Confirmed internally! This is just despicable.
Nearly all OEMs still allow you to upgrade to XP, but you have to ask. They won't tell you about it, you have to be active about it. But then, those that make active decisions about hardware and systems rarely end up with Windows, let alone MS Vista. Lots of people are getting burned by leaving too much of the decision up to the sales staff.
But even if you can't upgrade to XP, unless she's playing heavily some games that don't run in WINE or surfing a lot of WMV porn, then she'll get more mileage out of a linux distro like CentOS and Kubuntu. Try it. If they suck, then you can crow about it. If they save you time and effort, then it was time well spent and you can go around to any MS Vista users and rub their noses in it. Nowadays even Photoshop runs in WINE.
If it's for school only, then the 13" macbook is perfect for the backpack and can run your choice of Linux or OS X or both, plus a number of legacy applications from Windows.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
To be fair, the horrible grammar/spelling is probably because Ballmer is replying to emails on the road from a smartphone. I have found most managers reply with one liners like this when punching messages onto tiny smartphone keys.
What I've always found funny about Vista is that it had poor compatibility with existing Windows applications, and abysmal hardware support. You know, the two things that (rightly) prevent people from using another OS instead of Windows...
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
--- quote ---
From what I have seen, for 98% of things in XP 512MB is enough on a properly configured system. I'd say for XP that 128mb is "barely adequate."
--- end quote ---
Unless of course you like to run Photoshop, or you have a need to run Word and Dreamweaver at (gasp!) the same time, or you like to play mp3s while working or a number of other situations.
Novice users - you might say - are not going to be running Photoshop, but I will be that they *will* have a large number of applications open at once, without thinking anything of it.
I would argue that 512 was ok for 2000, but is inadequate for XP or (god forbid) Vista.
Click Start > Right Click 'Computer' > Advanced System Settings > Performance Settings > Adjust For Best Performance
Are you fucking kidding me? That's really in Vista? If it's a checkbox, why isn't it checked by default? If it's a slider, what does the other side say? "Needlessly consume CPU cycles"? "I'm stupid, tell me where to buy new hardware"?
What does this option do that turning off Aero (or going all the way back to 'Windows Classic' theme) doesn't do? Does this work on desktops, or is it a laptop-only thing where the other option is "Optimize for battery life"? Sorry, I don't have a Vista machine here or else I'd check for myself. Really, I want to know. I remember a tab like that in XP but all it did was turn off visual effects.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
No, that would be "flies like a chair". Which is wrong. Flies like a banana. Chimps like a chair.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
X= <-- Joke
/\
o
+ <-- you
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
"Are you fucking kidding me? That's really in Vista? If it's a checkbox, why isn't it checked by default? If it's a slider, what does the other side say? "Needlessly consume CPU cycles"? "I'm stupid, tell me where to buy new hardware"?"
There are four radio buttons:
- Let Windows choose what's best for my computer (default)
- Adjust for best appearance
- Adjust for best performance
- Custom
The first radio button is selected by default, and at least on my system, is the same as "Adjust for best appearance", which is what I would expect to be selected by default. This might be different on lower powered machines.
The "Custom" option lets you enable and disable about two dozen fine grained options such as "Slide taskbar buttons", or "Smooth edges of screen fonts".
Here is a summary for those that don't want to read the PDF:
Early 2006: Microsoft got cozy with HP to make sure that HP invested in a better graphical experience for Vista. Intel had to make its quarterly earnings and convinced Microsoft to call their chipset "capable" even though it couldn't meat the graphic standards. Microsoft had explicitly told HP that they wouldn't do this, but they, led by some dude named Will Poole, decided to bone HP to make Intel (specifically some SVP chick named Renee-most likely Renee James) happy. Then MS discussed how they are going to try to play it off to intel with some fancy obfuscating letter. They got this guy at MS named Jim Allchin to sign off on it, which he reluctantly did, but chastised them for pulling this crap. Some dude named Mike Ybarra pointed out to Jim that they are boning HP and their customers just to get cuddly wuddly with Intel and Jim seemed to agree, but figured the wheels were in motion and could not be stopped. Mike specifically said, "We are caving to Intel... We are really burning HP... We are allowing Intel to drive our consumer experience..."
Fast forward a year later and some board member John Shirley sends some borderline literate guy named Steve Balmer an email about how his shit won't work with Vista and that some of the stuff may never get Vista drivers. They surmise that vendors didn't trust them to deliver Vista (gee, wonder why) so they didn't make drivers. Balmer sends an email to some guy named Steven Sinofsky asking about the driver situation. Sinofsky agrees that vendors didn't expect them to ship and also says that changes to Vista made it so XP drivers wouldn't work, he questions how smart it was to call the Intel chipset "capable" when it wasn't, and says that they need to be clearer with the industry. Then some exec named Mike Nash points out how his company boned him because he bought a $2100 "Vista capable" laptop that is only good as an email machine.
In the end, some exec John Kalman says that lowering their standard for Intel screwed them and they won't make such a stupid mistake with Windows 7.
In short, Will Poole is a weasel who is just trying to make some Intel chick happy. Mike Ybarra is too thoughtful and has too much foresight to work at MS. Jim Allchin needs to go with his gut and remind Will Poole which side of the desk he sits on. Steve Ballmer is missing some keys on his keyboard. Steven Sinofsky and Kohn Kalman have 20/20 hindsight. HP deserves to kick somebody's ass at MS. They should probably kick Intel's ass too, but MS is too busy licking it.
This is so far out of whack, it's time for whack-a-troll.
(1) You point out that "novice users" (and that would be the vast majority of computer users), are not going to run Photoshop. Yet you mention that 512MB ain't enough to run it. Why did you even mention it then?
(2) You say "or you like to play mp3s while working", implying that this would overload a 512MB XP machine. I have mplayer.exe running with a movie paused -- 17MB of RAM used. 17MB more is going to break the XP camel's back?
(3) "or a number of other situation". You mean like running AutoCAD, a continuous system benchmark, and playing WoW...while downloading pr0n? Man, I see novices doing that all the time.
(4) "but I will be [sic] that they *will* have a large number of applications open at once". Well, in my experience novices tend to have a grand total of one program open at once, and if you try to leave a second one open they will close it, sometimes even when you have carefully minimized it. Many developers are this way as well -- wanting to squeeze an extra 50msec out of that recompile. Oh, and that one program is almost for sure 99% most likely you-can-bet maximized.
Real world situation #1: upgrading the dreaded mother-in-law computer to XP involving a machine with 64MB of RAM. Yup, one-eighth of what you are whining about. EVERYTHING I re-installed worked. MS O2k, CompuServe 2000, graphics editors, alternate browser, etc. Yes, everything ran slowly. Yes, it was slow to boot up (but not as slow as 512MB Vista machines). And when told how cheap RAM was, the m-i-l rushed out and bought 256MB.
Real world situation #2: my wife upgrading her computer while I was away. It went from 98 to XP Pro, with 320MB of RAM. The thing ran hundreds of games and everything else. Nobody ever thought it was slow. I used it myself for some things for a time. It was only replaced a year ago, and died of dust overload, if anything.
Somewhere a chair-thrower is rubbing his hands together and saying "Vista is right on target!"
I come here for the love
From what I can see, that's pretty much what it does. So in order to get good performance on Vista, according to Microsoft, you need to roll it back to Windows 2000 look-and-feel.
Breakfast served all day!
I believe this guy would disagree.
*blinks* Are you for real? 512MB is quite adequate for XP. That's what my wifes machine had before I upgraded it and that only because the RAM was on sale. I have a good dozen programms running in WinXP Pro and I have... wait for it.... 547MB used... So, yes, it would hit a bit on swap... However, with a good swap out strategy , it would be stuff I rarely use (if Windows has a good swap out strategy is another discussion). 512MB for XP is very adequate.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
The MS Vista debacle is fantastic. These Vista (in)capable machines run Linux just fine.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Microsoft is being bit by its own successful campaign of getting hardware manufactures to only support Windows with "Designed for Windows" hardware. These WinDevices (WinModems, WinPrinters, WinScanners, etc.) rely on Windows to do the bulk of their processing and if you change the way Windows interfaces with these devices (as is the case with Vista) you need to create brand new drivers from scratch. The problem is that hardware manufactures are not going to invest the time and money to make a discontinued piece of hardware work with Vista when they can sell you a shiny new one.
If Microsoft would have promoted "real" hardware that did not need specialized driver software which is intimately entangled in the internals of Windows, they would not be in this position. Take, for example, a standard Postscript printer: complicated low-level drivers are unnecessary in most operating systems and it just works (to steal a line from the Mac world).
Could you imagine a world where every multi-function device used standard USB communication to interface to the Postscript/PCL printer, SANE/TWAIN scanner, and the built-in fax modem was a standard serial device that used AT command sequences? If Microsoft promoted such standards, this device could not only "just work" with Vista, but also Mac OS (X or otherwise) Linux, OS/2, BeOS... basically everything. The conspiracy theory part of my brain says that MS just can't stand for that, which is why it did not "discourage" hardware manufactures from tying basic functionality to Windows.
But now that it needs to change the internals of Windows, Microsoft's hardware lock-in is coming home to roost.
(BTW, does anyone else think it is monumentally stupid that Vista does not support generic Postscript or PCL printers out of the box and must rely on HP or Adobe for such drivers?)
Schrödinger's cat is not amused—maybe.
Robin Leonard, a Microsoft employee, wrote that Wal-Mart is "extremely disappointed in the fact that the standards were lowered and feel like customer confusion will ensue.
If Walmart is complaining about quality, then you've really dumped a steaming turd into the marketplace.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!