Dell Documents Reveal Microsoft's Pre-launch Vista Errors

twitter writes "The New York Times has a piercing analysis of documents from the Vista capable lawsuit. The documents show that Microsoft seems to have put a wrench in Vista's driver situation only at the last minute. 'Late OS code changes broke drivers and applications, forcing key commodities to miss launch or limp out with issues,' said one slide in a Dell presentation dated March 25, 2007, about two months after Vista's launch at retail and availability on new PCs.' We have all heard the lazy vendors don't believe Vista will launch excuses but few of us have heard Steven Sinofsky, chief of Windows development, second and third opinions. 'Massive changes in the underpinnings for video and audio really led to a poor experience at RTM,' he said. 'This change led to incompatibilities. For example, you don't get Aero with an XP driver, but your card might not (ever) have a Vista driver.' Finally, said Sinofsky, other changes in Vista blocked Windows XP drivers altogether. 'This is across the board for printers, scanners, WAN, accessories and so on. Many of the associated applets don't run within the constraints of the security model or the new video/audio driver models.'

Comments

Link to original

[Anonymous Coward]

http://slashdot.org/~twitter/journal/197498

In case anyone wants to enjoy the usual "M$ Windoze" grade school creative spelling that the /. editor had to remove.

Give it up, dude

[Anonymous Coward]

You're wasting your time. Slashdot has officially degenerated into IHateVista.org. You'll just get shouted down by the adolescent Linux fanboys for daring to contradict the orthodoxy, whether you're right or not.

Just what we suspected...

[OglinTatas]

That Vista RTM had been delayed due to DRM issues... That the OS was probably scrapped in the first place to be rewritten with DRM as the underlying security model.

I had long thought, and I'm sure I'm not alone, that microsoft should have pulled an apple and damn the backward compatability. They should have rewritten the OS from scratch after windows XP, and shouldn't have dropped key features along the way like the new WinFS, for instance. They should have bought VMware and integrated a virtual machine with a full copy of the appropriate WindowsXP (pro for pro, home for home)to run all the older "mission critical" software in "classic mode." They could have deprecated the win32 API and most of MFC, and forced all NEW development to move to the .net runtime.

I suspect that the idea crossed their minds, whether or not they started to implement it, but they couldn't figure out how to guarantee front to back digital restrictions with such a dual-OS model.

Something, though, made them panic and start over a few years ago, scrapping any progress they made. And integrating DRM along the way kept making things worse.

Re:My Postmortem on Vista

[thomthom]

So what does this say about Ubuntu that releases a new version every 6 month? I'm not buying your argument. Did you expect them to take a break after Vista?

Pot and Kettle

[Eskarel]

Microsoft hashed the release of Vista, but the Linux community of all people has no right to talk about new releases making drivers incompatible. Backwards compatibility doesn't exist in the linux world.

The usual twitter lulz

[dedazo]

Only on Slashdot can someone get modded up and then two posts down say "fuck you asshole, I have a sockpuppet" without repercussions.