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."

Comments

The most damning email:

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

From bGates:

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.

Best quote...

[Wandering Wombat]

"I'm just grateful I kept XP on this machine."

At least...

[wellingtonsteve]

.. 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.

Re:At least...

[sm62704]

Let's hope they learn from these mistakes before Windows 7 comes out.

As someone who doesn't like Microsoft software and fervently wishes it weren't ubiquitous, I hope they DON'T learn from their mistakes. I'd like to see 90% of all computers sold running various distros of Linux, or actually any other OS but Windows. If Microsoft keeps it up that's what's going to hapopen. Don't discourage them!

Re:At least...

[bluefoxlucid]

There's also a difference between "Scrap it" and "We spent 10 years writing this crap and we're damn well going to sell it whether they want to upgrade or not!"

Re:At least...

[sm62704]

If it wasn't for their "embrace-extend-extinguish" motto, their "DOS ain't done 'til Lotus won't run", their refusal to interoperate, their reluctance to follow US and EU law I'd agree with you.

But until Gates, Balmer, and their entire Board of Directors and upper management staff are gone I see no prospect whatever of them changing their tune. Microsoft is bad news for anybody not directly associated with them, and bad news for many who are. If they actually were drinking their own koolaid I'd be a bit more sympathetic to them.

IMO We would all be better off if Microsoft ceased to exist tomorrow.

Re:At least...

[setagllib]

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.

Re:At least...

[beuges]

Sometimes I really hate slashdot. Its posters claim to keep themselves informed about technical issues, yet they constantly post untruth after untruth, and spread the very same FUD that they despise.

Please, please, PLEASE stop spreading the utter trash about the "dos aint done till lotus won't run" as if it is some sort of truth. It is not. Repeating it just makes you appear to be either a troll, or someone who unfortunately believed the misinformation trolls that post this crap on this site.

Please read the first few links on this search result and stop yourself spreading FUD in the future

And please, spare me the comments about being a M$$$ $hill. I have no affiliation with microsoft, I just really hate it when people spread misinformation on this site, which then gets repeated infinitely as if it were truth. The less FUD coming from, and aimed at microsoft, the better.

Re:At least...

[mysticgoat]

The phrase

Dos Ain't Done 'Til Lotus Don't Run is apocryphal, but the strategy that it describes was practiced by Microsoft in the late days of DOS, when Word was second fiddle to WordPerfect and Excel was an also-ran, trailing Lotus' 1-2-3 and Borland's Quattro.

Back in the day, those of us who were using various Business Basics to write custom code relied heavily on a thick reference book called Undocumented DOS, which described the hidden interface to DOS internals that were being used by Microsoft applications, but were not supposed to be used by third party developers because, well, because they weren't officially documented. They were, however, generally faster or in some other way better than the documented routines. The feeling was that if Word and Excel used these, they had to be pretty damn stable.

Microsoft continued this practice with the Windows 3.x APIs. I was doing other things by the end of that era, so I have no personal knowledge of anything after Windows For Workgroups.

While

Dos Ain't Done 'Til Lotus Don't Run may never have been actually chanted in the halls of Redmond, it is a very good at suggesting the oh so clever mixture of development and marketing strategy that Microsoft has built its edifice on.

Re:Shocked

[geekoid]

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.

Ballmer's first response

[CDOS_CDOS run]

"I going to f---ing kill the 915 chipset!"

Re:For more information

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

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.

Is it just me?

[sconeu]

OK, I'm officially a Paranoid Conspiracy Theorist(tm).

I read the title as "Disney", not "Dismay".

Re:For more information

[milsoRgen]

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.

Vista on minimal HW

[secPM_MS]

As my handle notes, I work at MS. I worked on Vista security during its development and was frequently at ship room concerning security issues. My focus is not on neat consumer feature and great graphics. I have found that Vista runs well on old hardware that is not really adequate for the new visuals. -- I turn off the Aero interface (which saves a lot of RAM as well), running "Windows Classic" for my UI. I then go to system advanced properties and optimize for performance. The resulting system works quite well. I have an old XP box (Dell GX620, ~ 3 GHz processor with 1 GByte of RAM) that I am running Vista business on. I added a 330 GByte drive and use it as an index server for ~ 150 GBytes of source code that I search. Except when it is syncing its files with the master, when ~ 40 command line processes run synchronization simultaneously, it is reasonably responsive.

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.

Re:Vista on minimal HW

[mzs]

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.

Re:Vista on minimal HW

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Vista on minimal HW

[Richard Fairhurst]

"Playing graphics games costs CPU and GPU processing power"

Official Microsoft advice: please refrain from playing graphics games on Vista. You may still, however, play text adventures. Honk if you love Zork.

Windows Vista: Designed For Infocom.

Re:Vista on minimal HW

[WGR]

Third party software can't secure the kernel, which is why you need an OS change. Other OS won't run most Windows software.

The problem with Vista is that to increase security, the OS had to restrict the ability to so easily add software that malware also was easy to install. This meant going to the Unix model of separating administrator accounts from user accounts by default. This caused problems in many device drivers which had not been properly written to use user level privileges by default. Many device manufactures really don't have smarts to write secure drivers, especially those who are trying to sell in the cost conscious consumer market.

Re:Vista on minimal HW

[cecom]

You make good points. In my opinion the improved security fully justifies using Vista for a new home PC. I am trying to be objective - I use Linux myself professionally, but I am very glad to have Vista instead of XP on my wife's laptop.

However if you consider a 3GHz CPU with 1 GB RAM to be "an old box", then you have some serious perception problems ... :-) An "old box" would be an Athlon 2000 with 512MB PC133 RAM and PATA66. XP runs just fine, thank you.

At the same time I have Vista Home Premium (dual booting with Debian) on a relatively powerful quad-core PC with 3GB RAM, 512MB NVIDIA 8XXX card, SATA, etc (the works), and while it is not slow, it is not snappy either ! I expect most things to be instantaneous on such hardware and they aren't. Sometimes I get the the waiting cursor even for trivial tasks like opening the control panel, with no other apps running ! (well, except Steam, the anti-virus and the other craplets that come with a pre-installed PC :-) That is a disgrace.

Re:Vista on minimal HW

[dissy]

"From my point of view, the reason to upgrade to Vista is its significantly higher security than XP, let alone the earlier OS's" Ok, first i was actually about to reply to the GP and defend you.
However, I assumed you meant what you said quoted up there, the main reason to upgrade from XP to Vista was security. Or at least by 'earlier OS's' you meant earlier versions of Windows.

And sure, valid point that would be!

But

OS X is definitely not more secure than Vista. Standard Linux consumer distros are not either. LOL

First off, so mods wont get 'facts' confused with 'troll', i need to post this url at the top:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/MS08-001.mspx
This will be explained nearly towards the bottom of this post alot better, however is proof your statement is false in a black&white binary world. If you are interested in real world facts where it isnt so clear cut, read on...

An OS that ships with zero services facing the internet (or LAN for that matter, since there is little difference outside of Windows World) is about 100% secure. No version of windows since 3.11 (IE any one with a tcp stack built in) has passed here, and still does.

'But then you add services' you say. Sure, ok. Failure again!

First, we should make the distinction between vender apps and 3rd party apps acting as services. We do this cuz it wouldnt be fair to blame MS for Joe Blows 'super secure internet cursors package' that connects to a remote server plaintext with no auth and executes a list of commands in a file.

Technically all linux services are 3rd party. However, lets bend the rule in windows favor here, and count the 'main' services included in almost all linux distros as not-3rd party (despite the fact they are), such as openssh, apache, bind, etc.

More linux services out of the box have been secure than windows ones, and for the linux ones that have had problems, they have been announced and patched/fixed generally in the time span one sleeps or goes to work in. Windows security bugs are usually swept under the rug and hidden from public view for at least a week, more commonly a month, and in a few rare extreams for years. (See below for proof)
So thats 16-24 HOURS to a fix for opensource apps, and whenever next tuesday rolls around for Windows (IE up to 7 days if the hole is major sever and reported minutes or an hour after patch tuesday just hit.)

Now lets hit the OSX part. You are more correct there, but still not really.
OSX out of the box is by defiinition FAR more secure than vista. Open OSX services: 0, Open vista services: >1
What that means is vista has potential holes that are out there, and wont be reported to us for months (standard MS track record) and wont be fixed till next tuesday (1-7 days), and there is a non 0% chance that disabling that windows services is not possible (no matter how small), which is not the case in OSX.

So, that leaves OSX local exploits compared to vista, and 3rd party introduced ones. In that area I dont know. So i'll give you that just cuz I also dont care to know. easy points, and perfectly plausible to be true.
Apple has had its cases of delaying fixes and trying to hide security issues that don't fall in their opensource components.

Hell, up till very recently (~1-2 months ago) there was a flaw in ALL windows TCP stacks that lets an attacker simply execute code (Ok, in fairness, except for windows 2k, which it just crashed instead of ran code) which included vista.
This bug has existed for many many years and just recently reported and fixed.

you think the 0day hacking groups havent known about this for many years? no, they do, and use it.
Vista was out of the box vulnerable to having remote code executed simply by being on a network.

BTW, here it is from MS's own knowledge base
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/MS08-001.mspx

Re:Vista on minimal HW

[unixfan]

Agreed. One of the biggest mistake people do when deciding that something is more secure is to do things the way it is supposed to work. A good example is how packet filtering firewalls allowed any traffic in if they just said "I'm a response to a request you sent". When they designed the firewall technology they clearly did not expect people to do non standard things like that.

After getting seriously hacked they came out with stateful inspection which keeps track of requests going out so they can reasonably tell if an inbound packet is a reply and not a hack.

The point being that crackers, thieves and other criminals cannot be counted on to do things the "right way". By lying, cheating and doing things in a totally unexpected way they find ways around the barriers we put up.

Like digging a tunnel under the wall to get in. You're supposed to try to _walk_ in.

This is where most people fall short when they evaluate how secure something is. They test it the way they are supposed to. Never imagining someone doing it backwards and upside down. So limiting functionality that should never have been turned on by default, with windows there obviously are a lot of things you can do to make it more secure. Giving off a nice warm feeling of how much more secure it is. Then missing obvious buffer overflows and new holes created by the new buggy code.

Windows people usually never realize that Unices have a design philosophy that makes it much easier to lock down. (The concept of one small and simple program that does one thing really well. Then just chain them to get added functionality.) I constantly run into windows techs who think their computer is safe because they unchecked check boxes and so on. (It is no coincidence that OpenBSD can tout the statistics they have. The sound design philosophy on Unix allowed them to accomplish what billion dollar operations cannot.)

Did these cats ever research what hackers/crackers have done and how they got in? Nope. It just feels right to them, so it must be more secure.

A pity, truely

[downix]

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.

Re:A pity, truely

[Quiet_Desperation]

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. I hear their lead programmer was crushed under an avalanche of metaphors.

Can AMD use this?

[Cryophallion]

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.

Shows how Microsoft lost its way

[ahabswhale]

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.

Re:Shows how Microsoft lost its way

[kisielk]

They do care about their customers. Except that their customers are not us, they are Dell, HP, et al.

Re:Shitty Lawsuit, Bad Priorities

[Foofoobar]

I've been using Vista since it came out and have helped to install it on several machines in our office. I can honestly say now that all of those machines I have had to reinstall XP on and with good reason; hardware incompatibilities, software incompatibilities, slowdowns, crashes, freezeups.

I love the new Vistas look and feel but unfortunately it just doesn't perform the way it was promised and they did rush it to market. I think that any company that rusahes a product to market and the consumer ends up paying for it, should be punished for such negligence. If this were a car manufacturer or a drug manufacturer, you would see the same thing. So why should Microsoft be any different?

Mike Nash

[mfh]

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.

Performance. thats it

[unity100]

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.

My Vista came with a warning label

[Provocateur]

In case of performance issues, look! Over there!
Isn't that Britney checking into rehab?

Microsoft's REAL error

[d23tek]

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.

Quite revealing...

[Stormwatch]

Has anyone else noticed that Steve Ballmer barely ever uses punctuation?

Re:Quite revealing...

[khraz]

I found it amusing that Ballmer writes like a barely-literate teenage girl would before all that sms-speak came about. I wonder if the only books he reads have pictures in them.

Re:Quite revealing...

[closetpsycho]

When you hurl a chair at somebody's head, an exclamation point just seems kind of redundant.

Re:For more information

[sunwukong]

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.

Re:Shitty Lawsuit, Bad Priorities

[texas neuron]

First for possible bias - I have a business with 6 machines running XP exclusively (2 Fujitsu, 4 Dell) and 2 Macs running Tiger (soon to be Leopard) and XP. Second, I am a physician and in general I hate lawsuits.

If you read the emails, they allowed labeling that had Designed for Windows Vista Basic Logo, Designed for Windows Vista Premium Logo, and then then a Vista Capable logo. Microsoft thought the requirements for the Vista Capable logo is that users "will have a good experience, at least equivalent to Windows XP, when upgraded to Windows Vista."

I think Microsoft will lose on 2 fronts - their technical requirements apparently are having machines that run Windows Vista to perform worst then Windows XP when they indicate their Vista Capable logo should be equivalent. Second, since they were the ones telling the OEMs what the labels were and the requirements for them, then they needed to communicate this to the end user by having a sanctioned straight forward information sheet available at each sales point.

What surprises me most about the emails is how they apparently caved in to Intel when they were aware that they were sacrificing the "Vista Experience" for their future buyers. It is no wonder only 1/3rd or so Window Vista License holders are actually running windows Vista (estimate based on combining netapplications market share for Mac OS X and Windows Vista combined with Steve Job's statement of total Mac OS X installed base and Bill Gates statement of 100,000,000 licenses sold.)

Re:I don't get what the problems are

[jerkychew]

It's not just the chipset per se, it's the chipset + embedded graphics. You're getting good Aero performance because you're running an AGP card.

One big reason why few want Vista...

[BUL2294]

From the article--an e-mail from Steven Sinofsky to Ballmer...

People who rely on using all the features of their hardware (like Jon's Nikon scanner) will not see availability for some time, if ever, depending on the mfg. The built-in drivers never have all the features but do work. For example, I could print with [my] Brother printer and use it as a stand-alone fax. But network setup, scanning, print to fax must come from Brother.

There it is, in plain English. This is what's killing Vista, and Microsoft already saw it a year ago! Ignoring Vista's perceived issues with DRM (which can be circumvented), speed issues & app compatibility (which can be improved with a service pack), and UAC (which has been improved with SP1), many people don't want to throw out even one item of hardware so they could use Vista. And they're right not to do so...

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.

no Aero on minimal HW

[d23tek]

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.

Re:For more information

[pallmall1]

That would have been you, or your daughter since nobody forced you to buy it. Hell, 512MB on a laptop with XP is barely adequate so it should be no surprise that it's barely adequate for Vista.

Yeah, like the average shopper at Best Buy is supposed to know this. They don't. And the stickers were supposed to relieve the shopper of the uncertainty regarding the hardware's ability to run the latest Windows operating system. Microsoft said, "trust us," and the shoppers who did got fucked. But that's no surprise, either. It's the Microsoft way.

I can see why Jim Allchin retired.

[gh]

One line said it all:

"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. ... Apple did not lose their way."

Anybody know if he's since switched to using a Mac? :)

Re:I don't get what the problems are

[harry666t]

Meanwhile I run Linux on my wristwatch with 8kb ram, 8x2 text display and two buttons (one for displaying an ascii-art penguin logo and the other for posting this post I am posting at the moment) and I can even run compiz on it (and it runs pretty damn OK), do most of my development (I research operating systems, artificial intelligence and new ways of man-machine comm), heck, I even play minesweeper on it, and- ha! It runs more smoothly than Vista's minesweeper on a Core 2 Quad with 32 GB of ram and SEVEN monitors (but I guess monitor count doesn't add or subtract too much to/from overall system performance, but I might be wrong).

Re:Punctuation is a sign of weakness and indecisio

[Joe the Lesser]

Cleary. There. Are. Some. Exceptions. To. This. Rule.

Some insight into Vista release prep

[Ripit]

FTFA, Steven Sinofsky's first bulleted point in an email to Steve Ballmer:

No one really believed we would ever ship so they didn't start the work until very late in 2006. This led to the lack of availability. For example my home multi-function printer did not have drivers until 2/2 and even pulled their 1/30 drivers and re-released them (Brother).
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.

The Evil Empire Shows Its colors

[curmudgeon99]

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.

Re:For more information

[SgtChaireBourne]

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? ...

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.

Re:What's up with Ballmer?

[lenova]

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.

Vista: The Most Linux-like Version of Windows Yet

[RAMMS EIN]

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...

Re:For more information

[Haeleth]

Microsoft said, "trust us," and the shoppers who did got fucked.

Sucks to be them, but I still don't see where they deserve my sympathy. Trusting Microsoft is a sign of either wilful ignorance or terminal negligence. There's nothing wrong with choosing Vista if you decide after consideration that it's the OS that meets your needs best, but if you buy a computer without doing the research first, you deserve everything you get.

Re:Shitty Lawsuit, Bad Priorities

[sm62704]

I've been using Vista since it came out and have helped to install it on several machines in our office.

You fiend! How much are you extorting them for removal?

Come to think of it that would be a nice racket...

Re:For more information

[sootman]

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.

Re:For more information

[dgatwood]

No, that would be "flies like a chair". Which is wrong. Flies like a banana. Chimps like a chair.

Re:For more information

[joshv]

"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".

Emails (pdf) Summary

[petehead]

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.

It's time, boys and girls, for

[justthinkit]

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!"

Re:It's time, boys and girls, for

[Just Some Guy]

my wife upgrading her computer while I was away.

You had me until then. Well played, sir!

MS bit by its own lock-in

[mamer-retrogamer]

many people don't want to throw out even one item of hardware so they could use Vista

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?)