Microsoft Begs Hardware Makers To Take Support Seriously

Banana ricotta pancakes writes "Microsoft has confirmed that there will be a widespread public beta of Windows 7 in early 2009, while urging device manufacturers to start immediate testing with its pre-beta release to avoid the widespread hardware compatibility problems that contributed so much to the negative perception of Vista. 'There is not another WinHEC planned before Windows 7 is released,' Microsoft has warned them. Better hope that testing goes well."

Comments

Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal

[gabebear]

I own two pieces of hardware that are Microsoft branded... and they have had far worse driver support on Windows than any other hardware I own.

• MN-720 802.11G PCCard: No Vista(or even XP SP3) compatiblity... WHY?
• Microsoft Intellimouse optical: The driver in the link doesn't recognize this mouse... What's really funny is MS's Mac Intellimouse driver works perfectly. This is a rather old mouse, it was one of the very first optical mice available($70 back in the day).

I may just have bad luck... but Microsoft's driver compatibility is frighteningly bad.

Re:Why bother?

[mattytee]

This

Enjoy.

Re:Why bother?

[Q-Hack!]

Mostly we don't because of things like this:

Creative Goes After Driver Modder

Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal

[TheRaven64]

As the original article points out, it's a pretty meaningless statistic. Hardware support only matters to users when it's hardware they own. Linux supports an obscure SCSI card that only three people own - great if you're one of those three people, irrelevant otherwise. FreeBSD supports all of the hardware (with the possible exception of the modem - I don't have a phoneline, so I've not tried it) in my ThinkPad, so do I care that Linux and Windows support more devices in total? OS X supports everything in my MacBook Pro, so do I care that Windows supports more devices?

I used to have a gaming mouse that was supported by Linux but not Windows (it shipped with drivers for Win98, which didn't work with 2K and the manufacturer never supported 2K). Did it matter to me that Windows supported vastly more hardware than Linux at the time? No, because it didn't support my hardware. Same with my VooDoo 2 - Microsoft changed the driver model with Windows 2000 to prevent 3D-only cards working. I could still play GLQuake under Linux, but not under Windows. Again, the fact that 2K had better support in general meant nothing to me. Only the specific cases of failure mattered (and the fact that Linux didn't support my NIC or modem at the time was equally frustrating).