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

Re:Hasn't MS always done things like this?

[Otter]

That this is at least the second dupe of this story might be why it's so fresh in your memory...

Re:Vastly Different Models

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, goody, I see Slashdot has fixed their broken moderation system that assigns AC posts a score of -2:

Starting Score: -1 points
Moderation: +1
50% Informative
50% Interesting

Wait, so it has at least two moderations, both positive. This nets +1 point for a total score of 0. On a post that should have started at 0 in the first place.

Plus, if you're using the new comment system, getting at low-modded posts is next to impossible anyway. (Pound "More" a couple of times and then drop the hidden all the way to the bottom.)