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158 Pages of Microsoft's Dirty Laundry
KrispyRasher writes "Even internally, Microsoft couldn't agree on what the base requirements to run Vista were, but that didn't stop it from inaccurately promoting the OS as running on some hardware. 158 pages of Microsoft internal emails reveal scandalous truths about the squabbles that took place in the lead up to Vista's launch."
Microsoft execs on Vista problems is an excellent summary of the affair so far.
This class action suit isn't looking too good for Microsoft, I would say (though I'm not a lawyer, fortunately)
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
A VP in Microsoft buys a Sony laptop with 915 graphics and a Brother multifunction printer? I've suggested elsewhere on these pages that Microsoft management may not always be of the same high quality as their scientific and engineering staff, but two such misjudgements from one exec is worrying. Especially as one assumes that the guy didn't do it for lack of cash.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Of course the truth was stretched by M$. I like the part where they favor their buddies at Intel and say Vista runs well on low end chips, just to help an investor report.
The larger problem is even if you have the next thing to a super computer, Vista is still Vista. Doing mysterious DRM checks while copying files at a rate that would embarrass a TRS-80 Model 1, and all of the other issues of driver incomparability.
Vista is still prone to viruses and Trojans in no small part because M$ still lets it run as root and not need physical password entry to install or run a program.
Before any of the M$ fanbois out here start modding this down, go download the latest Ubuntu, install it on your "Vista Capable Machine" , try using it for a while, then honestly look and see if it isn't superior for desktop use than Vista.
I think you will be surprised.
Or, for those that think you have to pay for software in order for it to work, go over to an Apple store and try OS X.
After doing either of those 2 things, then see if you can come up with some reason, other than monopolistic domination and pre-installation as a reason that anyone would want Vista.
I am glad to say that Vista really is the new Edsel.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Although I'm not a MSFT fanboi, I can see how defining compatibility is not easy. Although a given OS certainly will not run on ancient hardware or hardware lacking key features, the required MB of RAM, GB of disk, and GHz of CPU are all subjective requirements once the hardware is above some minimum spec. I know that I've run OSes on hardware that were below the recommended spec and found them quite usable (for my purposes). Add the fact that the company must set the required hardware spec before finishing the OS and its no wonder that MSFT picked a spec that some find unbearable.
I'm not surprised by the internal squabbles or that the company would pick a spec that's lower than what some engineers argued for.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
...is the discussion over the miserable driver situation. They eventually conclude that IHVs didn't expect them to ever ship Vista, and that the IHVs also didn't trust Microsoft enough to work hard at getting their drivers working on the Vista betas because they expected subsequent changes to Vista that would break the drivers and negate all the effort.
These guys honestly seem perplexed that the IHVs don't trust Microsoft. I find that utterly hilarious.
on an 8 core 6.5 with 12 gig of ram.
A lot of things are going wrong for Microsoft right now...
- "Vista Ready" is starting to mean a huge liability
- The EU seems determined to make Microsoft stick to the rules
- MS's OOXML effort is running into real resistance
- Apple keeps taking more and more of the desktop and laptop market
- The EEE PC has finally turned Linux into a mainstream "feature"
- Trying to buy Yahoo has made MS look really weak in Internet services
- Its "we'll sue Linux for patent infringement" FUD is convincing no-one
- It's being sued persistently by patent trolls in the USA
I'm just wondering if 2008 will be the year that sees Microsoft humbled by the market and its own inability to deliver products people actually *want* to use.
A whole lot of people are going to sing and dance in the streets if things do go badly wrong for Microsoft. They don't have a lot of friends left, unless they're willing to buy them.
My blog
What Microsoft feared most about Google has become true now: The application stack has shifted up, and now the web browser has become the new OS. No one cares about Vista because no one needs a new OS anymore. All they care about is getting their news and email, IM'ing and watching youtube. Flash and AJAX have completely supplanted the OS.
The only reason why you need a new OS is for new features, but frankly, no one needs them. The only reason why people use an OS these days is to interact with local files, but the vast majority of people only care about 2 types of files: MP3s and digital photos. Even Word documents are becoming marginalized now. So what's the point of a desktop search for newer kids these days, when they stick everything online now?
Because of the lack of importance of new OS features, that's why other OSes like Mac OS are gaining steam, because Windows isn't as essential as it was 10 years ago. It's a perfect storm of good for Apple, they are becoming ever-increasingly "cooler", and the need for Windows is diminishing, so people can still get their email and watch youtube and still get the same experience. This is also why everyone is still using XP, a 7 year old OS, without any complaints. No one cares, and it scares Microsoft to death.
They shit the bed in their attempt to make Vista relevant and they lost their one-and-only chance. I'm sure Vista will be adopted eventually, but it will probably take another 5 years because it is as popular as XP is now.
if no one cares about Vista how come theres a class action lawsuit in progress?
That would require at least a few caring about the Vista they bought.
Been reading the pdf the past days, and altough it seems as if there was many sensible voices over at microsoft, they had to much of a momentum forward, making it hard to change directions midcourse. it's really a pain reading those letters knowing what vista ended up at. I'm just hoping to find a reference like "this is ME all over again" somewhere in those letters, would have been so nice to hear that from the horses mouth :)
and btw: it's 158 pages, not 185.
Doolittle :
Bomb no.20 : To explode of course.
I'm sure Vista will be adopted eventually, but it will probably take another 5 years because it (Vista) is as popular as XP is now.
I would wager that XP is about 10 times as popular as Vista now... at the very least. Application (in)compatibility is the single biggest problem for corporates, while for home users... as you said, Vista brings nothing new since a browser and Flash is all that home users need. I think Vista will take much more than 5 years to get adopted... by which time its successor should hopefully mkae it ME-II.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Microsoft is always in something of a no-win position when it comes to minimum system requirements. If it specifies huge hardware needs, then the opportunity to sell upgrades is reduced since most existing PCs can't handle the new version. If it sets a minimal baseline platform, then it's difficult (though arguably not impossible) to add any features that make upgrading worth the hassle and risk.
It would have been easy to add features to make Vista worth buying: make it modular, make it simpler, make it more rather than less reliable, and make the features that reduce Windows security optional, and look at what your best competitors were doing.
* Make the HTML control optional, rewrite the control panel applets and other shell components that need it to work without it, and change the tight binding between rendering and access control. Provide a "legacy" wrapper for it so that old programs can use the insecure API, but make THAT optional as well.
* Make the DRM optional. Vista without DRM would still use the old XP drivers and remain compatible with XP, but wouldn't have the components to run the latest encrypted media, so give us the option... Basic Vista or Video Vista. If you don't install Windows Media Player, you get WMP 2.0 and a WMV3 codec so you can play most video, but if you want to play HD-DVD you need to take on the full thing.
* Bundle Interix with ALL versions of Vista. They could call it "A better UNIX than Linux".
* Remove the crippling in Terminal Server, allow multiuser use over networks. If you can't afford to upgrade all your computers to Vista you can use the old ones as terminals to your Windows Home Server.
* Bundle Visual Studio, in the package, the way Apple bundles XCode and all free UNIXes bundle their compilers. Windows is the last hold out of the horror of the '80s... the compiler-less OS.
These might not sell to home users, but it would sell to business, and don't forget that what got Windows into the home for a lot of people was the fact that they were using it at the office.
But this would all be diametrically opposed to Microsoft's "we know better than you what you want, and that's *our* OS, not yours" policies. Hell, even Apple gave up on the idea of unbundling access to UNIX from Rhapsody, and if it's not too scary for APPLE users it's not too scary for Windows.
As much as I want to believe how this "cloud computing" has supplanted the local one, it's not the case. Online services are in their infancy.
Okay, maybe email, but most of the stuff that deals with productivity is very much a client-side affair. Have you tried editing a picture in an ajax-y environment? It's a mess. The bandwidth isn't there and the browsers are retrofitted to perform functions no one really anticipated.
Audio/Video editing, image manipulation, or tasks with large files will keep the local computing relevant for a long time.
Contrary to popular belief, people don't love XP. It's just Vista was such a terrible upgrade that many came to appreciate their old OS.
Microsoft's problem was ambition. They looked at Apple innovations and kept moving the goalposts with every OSX release until they had a monster of an OS that beat the shit out of OSX... on paper. When it came time to implement it, Microsoft scrapped most good features (WinFS, etc) to make the release.
They let the perfect become the enemy of the good. As a web developer I am confronted with this with every project - should I upload a moderately buggy product and then make incremental changes or get stuck in first draft hell for the sake of having a perfect product from day one? The former is a more productive approach and results in a better overall output.
There was talk of some magical OS Microsoft was going to release back in 2003, named XP Reloaded. I don't know whether this was real or not, but they should have done this and refined the OS instead of sitting on their asses for half a decade.
"Upgrade" implies that the new version is significantly better.
Vista is
-worse in performance
-maybe better in security (UAC is a nice try, but reportedly many people just switch it off because it is too annoying)
-has DX10 (whatever you think about it...)
-has more eyecandy if Aero is available
By pushing a version without Aero at all, Microsoft have thrown away (for that version) one of the two things thing that would immediately signal "Hey, I am new and shiny". That sort of mistake is quite untypical for them. It would not be the first time that Microsoft sells something that looks good and later turns out to be an unreliable POS. But selling something without "bells and whistles" factor is new for them.
C - the footgun of programming languages
The thread on this subject the other day had an good comment from a former MS employee. Vista works well if you do the following
1. Turn of Aero
2. Switch to Classic mode/view whatever it is called (makes it look like Windows 2000)
3. Go into System properties and set to optimize for best performance.
A friend tried it on two systems (one is a new quad-core) and is much happier now. So where does that get you? Basically, system that looks like Windows 2000, performs like XP, and has the underneath the cover features of Vista like "enhanced" security, searching, etc.
I haven't tried Vista yet because of the lackluster performance and no compelling reasons to run it. Knowing it can be setup to run faster is nice but I still can't see anyone spending money on Vista just to turn off all of the eye candy.
I'll stick with XP at work and Ubuntu & XP at home for now.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
She continued, "Please give this some consideration; it would be a lot less costly to do the right thing for the customer than to spend dollars on the back end trying to fix the problem." That snippet was really insightful. Shit, Microsoft *should* have made those two stickers (Vista Home Capable and Vista Others). When they announced that there would be 6 different versions of Vista everybody *knew* it would bring problems...
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The class action lawsuit is from people who bought a new PC (hence the "Vista Capable" claim) with Vista. What they wanted was a new PC, not Vista in particular. Vista was probably given very little consideration other than "the newest version of Windows? Sure, sounds good".
Then they got it home and found how bad it runs. Much worse than their last, less powerful PC.
So it's not really so much about them caring that Vista runs like crap, it's them caring that their PC that they just bought runs like crap.
Really, Vista is the biggest "meh" in computer history.
As opposed to a $2100 email machine with aero?
This is Slashdot. You get modded up for mocking Microsoft and BSD and modded down for mocking Linux.
You will get flamed AND modded into oblivion if you as much as critisize Apple. And I really don't want to find out what would happen to you if would start mocking Apple. I never EVER heard from those guys again.
Unfortunately for me, I am a gamer. Serious PC gaming is still pretty much stuck on the windows platform. They tried pushing us to Vista with DX10 and when they EoL XP, they will have succeeded. I, for one, will be taking a closer look at Wine on my Ubuntu partition. I just hope it really works as described. Does any one know of any other linux gaming solutions? I suppose I do still have an itch for nethack every once in a while.
It's even funnier than stated.
A year ago a friend and I bought near-identical low-end laptops: Celeron single-core 1.6 CPUs, Intel 945 graphics, etc - one Acer (mine) and one Toshiba. These were $400 Best-Buy-sale-o-the-week critters. Both shipped originally with Vista Home Basic. We set them up with 1gig memory each (533) - they had shipped with 512 and Vista was utterly unusable.
At 1gig we tested both with MS-Office 2003. He still had Vista. I had Ubuntu Feisty 7.04, Innotek Virtualbox 1.52 I believe it was, and Windows XP running as a virtual machine with 512megs of it's own RAM leaving 512 for Ubuntu.
The Ubuntu/XP mutant combo spanked the Vista box - severely - in everything but boot time as my rig had to boot two OSes in succession.
At that time getting Office '03 to work in Wine was a no-go. It's at least possible now I've heard, and that might be even faster. But regardless, Vista with one gig should have been able to keep up with virtualized XP running in 512...it wasn't even close.
Need I mention that I rapidly converted my bud to Ubuntu/XP?
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
Check out page 47 of the PDF. There's a pretty interesting table showing the percentage of crashes attributed to each graphics vendor. Nvidia is way out front, with 25% compared to less than 10% for ATI.
Search first, ask questions later.
You (and many others) are assuming that "microsoft exec" means someone involved with the engineering side of the business. Any large (or even medium sized company) software company has lots of positions that are completely non-technical: HR, legal, facilities. Furthermore, software development is only one of many lines of business Microsoft is in. Would you expect someone who manages graphic artists to know (or even care about) the inner workings of an operating system?
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
I got a new HP desktop as a gift, 3 GB ram, AMD dual core 6000 and "powered by nvidia" runs Vista fine and ran Vista exclusivly for two weeks then started dual-booting arch linux. Vista didn't have any noticeable performance or stability problems, I think Linux does run faster but not hugely so it could be I'm more comfortable in Linux. Some friends of mine have HP laptops with Vista, loaded up a bunch of games from Best Buy and the machines are sluggish feeling and very unstable. All told I wouldn't recommend Installing Vista yourself, let an OEM go through the pain and suffering with drivers and definitely get a high-end machine for Vista, it's a very YMMV thing. The reported "noiseness" of the warning seem exagerated to me and installing software as a LUA is much easier and more rational than the hoops you have to jump through in XP are.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
There was talk of some magical OS Microsoft was going to release back in 2003, named XP Reloaded.
Yeah, it was released, it's called Windows Server 2003. It is everything Windows XP should have been...games run great, audio / graphic production works great and seems to 'never' crash.
Intel 910 works mighty fine on Compiz-Fusion with almost all eye candies enabled.
If Aero cannot work well on Intel 910, it's probably because Aero is an incompetent pile of junk compared to Compiz.
Actually, you'll find it's because Aero demands decent pixel shader support to do the blur effect underneath the titlebar (aka, glass). That's the difference between compiz and aero, basically. Aero uses a bunch of pixel shaders, and thus, limits itself as to what cards can do everything. Compiz uses basic transforms (in most cases) instead, and runs on more hardware as a result. (Note, hardware accelerated alpha blending isn't texture-mapped blurring. The latter's a bit more complex)
Which looks better is a matter of subjective opinion. Glass looks nice to me, but then, I only ever have high-end video cards. Some of the compiz effects are nice as well, although quite a few just bring a system to it's knees just as easily as Aero will, and some compiz effects seem fairly pointless. A lot of it is asthetics, although compiz does have some handy ones as well as just visually appealing ones.
ash
Microsoft does not sell software.
It sells lies.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
It is very slow and I/o intensive and offers little benefit over Vista.
I have a dual core laptop and one program can make Vista feel very unresponsive even if there are two processors. When I downgraded to XP the system still felt responsive and the otehr CPU took things over quite well.
Also on a notebook Vista will just pound on the hard disk randomly for hours at a time for no reason. Running MS resource manager I found out it was running disk defragmenting and registry backup programs very slowly in the background which would eat battery life.
Games are slower and so is video performance.
I have none of these problems after downgrading to XP. XP loads in about 20 seconds and 2 minutes were required on the same system with Vista.
In general one is just really slow and irrating.
http://saveie6.com/
OK. I am a Windows developer, and have been for ages - Windows suddenly became good with NT4 when everyone I knew and worked for decided to migrate from proprietary unix systems to NT.
.... and been renamed and hidden behind another dialog!
I've run every Windows OS since then really.
So, I installed Vista a few months after it became available. It looks nice, I have aero and the sidebar going with a couple of gadgets and I've even grown used to the 'search instead of start menu'.
Things I havn't got used to: the changed Control Panel, it *still* confuses me that 'Add/Remove programs' is now 'Programs and Features' - why do they still do this?! The ones that I use a lot change too - want to change networking... there's 3 dialogs now: Network and Sharing Centre, Network and Device Manager (there doesn't seem to be an easy way to alter settings, start in one, wait for it to 'discover' networks near me (sigh) and then I get to change things).
The same applies to display options - right click on the desktop, you used to choose Properties (or display options) and there you had a dialog to change your settings. Now you only have the 'Personalise' option, with a futher list of options, none of which are intuitive enough to me for what I want to do.
So yes, the 'knobs' have moved
The same applies to Explorer, the 'copy files' minidialog is a nuisance - sometimes it sits there for some time deciding how long it'll take to delete or copy a file, and it occasionally gets it wrong - I have on a couple of times selected a few files in temp, pressed delete and saw it telling me its going to delete everything on my C drive!
I had explorer hang the other day when I renamed a partition label. Annoys me a lot, the amount of time Explorer flakes out on me (its not that often, just enough)
LSASS can go crazy quite often too - why does it need to thrash the disk for half an hour is beyond me. The task scheduler is phenomenally overengineered (as is the new event viewer) taking 5 panes with 2 treeviews to show me the 38 tasks Vista set up. Oh, and when I initially installed Vista the Task Scheduler MMC crashed everytime I tried to edit a task, turns out it had a corrupted system security object (I forget exactly what it was, but this was a fresh install on a clean HDD)
I have turned off UAC and the indexing service so I can't comment on them.
All in all, I don't see anything to make me really want to stay with Vista (though I imagine I'm too lazy to change it again - not unless I go through networking hell like on Thursday), it gives me nothing that XP didn't give me, and XP was a bit less confusing all round. XP also hung less and 'pauses' much less.
Maybe it'll be better with SP1, but I think times are changing. This is the big chance Linux has, as big as it was when the world realised 'we can get NT for £1000 a workstation that performs as well as that AIX box that costs us £10000'.
These emails paint a wildly different picture of the future financial viability of Vista and the revenue it was meant to generate versus M$'s public disclosures. A clear case of fraudulent misrepresentation of the qualities of the main product in order to inflate M$'s share price and in turn Ballmer's and Gates personal wealth. How many other M$ executives profited by this deceit, selling shares based upon insider information about the poor qualities of the main M$ product and it's likely impact upon future revenues which is already evidenced by heavy discounting.
So will the SEC sit on it's hands or will it start to consider that mass media advertising, press releases, and web site advertising that is designed to mislead customers is also intended to mislead investors.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen