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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'
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.
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.
And why wouldn't he? The laptop carried the "Vista Capable" sticker, so you'd think it was capable of running Vista, and every piece of hardware comes with drivers for Windows, that's just a given.
Of course, with what we know now, he should have asked around first "Hey guys, does Vista Capable mean it can run Vista? Can I get drivers for a popular piece of commodity hardware?".
I'm sure he believed the hype from MS on this worryingly dodgy OS.
(disclaimer: I have a MSDN copy of Vista Ultimate, and even I'm thinking of going back to XP.)
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?
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.
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!