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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."
Why would hardware manufacturers bother to write drivers for a Windows Beta release? Especially one that probably won't be released for several years, and the driver requirements and API and such are likely to change several times before then. So many people are happy with XP or Linux, they can wait until the first RC to come out (Microsoft calls it Gold).
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
I'm not sure that really has much to do with it. This isn't about MS keeping the OEMs from shipping other OSes, something that they are still pretty good at, this is about MS trying to get the device makers to ship drivers that don't suck, something that they've never had all that much luck with, though they seem to be very gradually improving.
MS doesn't have the power to coerce decent drivers out of the manufacturers ("Hmm, I see here that your latest wifi chipset driver has 37 unresolved trouble tickets. If you ever want your silicon to run on Windows again..."); but none of the device manufacturers have anything to gain from manipulating perceptions of windows. If one device vendor makes horrific drivers, consumers will blame windows; but OEMs will just drop that vendor. MS has a bit of power, with their driver certification stuff; but driver quality mostly comes down to the battle between the desire to save money by skimping on engineering and the desire to actually be able to sell products that don't ruin your reputation completely.
If MS were out there, begging vendors to write drivers for Windows, that would be a role reversal.
Now that Microsoft are feeling the pinch of competition, they no longer have hardware manufacturers over a barrel. The hardware manufacturers now have the power to control the public perception of Windows, rather than Windows controlling the perception of hardware.
How did you come to this conclusion? The number of Windows users is still growing. OS X is taking a small percentage from that share, but their software is still restricted to their own hardware, making it very uninteresting for hardware manufacturers.
It's the fact that Windows is open to any hardware that makes manufacturers prefer this operating system. Also, the two factions live in symbiosis since none would exist without the other. Basically, Microsoft wants their software to work well and the manufacturers surely want their hardware to work well in what is to become the next major operating system that over 90% of the world's population uses.
Full Tilt
Microsoft doesn't, why should hardware makers?
Microsoft is concerned about hardware support?
OK, I can guess that they caught a lot of flak for the recent drivers situation with Vista, but shouldn't they be more upfront about software support?
Of all the computer problems, how many of us are impacted by hardware? Yes, the hard drives die, and occasionally something will hiccup, but for every one of those issues, there are 10 "my computer is running slower now than a week ago", or there is a crazy file that I can't delete, or "I'm getting notices to buy a spyware cleaner". For all those issues, who do people call? Not Microsoft... Pfft, they call Dell, HP, or whomever they bought their box from.
So then Dell and HP in turn end up doing Microsoft software support. (Unless they just forward you to Microsoft's call center in India.)
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Unfortunately, we have the curse of penny-pinching to blame for that one. Printers nice enough to have Postscript interpreters have been just working with nothing more than a ppd for longer than I've been alive. More recently, USB has a standardized printer class, and IPP for network printing is not exactly exotic.
I don't know exactly why the printers actually available(particularly the cheap ones) have resisted standardization so sharply; but the state of the market is terrible, as you note, despite their being good ways to do it. It isn't like the bad old days of USB webcams, where everybody rolled their own because no standards existed, people seem to be actively doing the wrong thing with printers.
I think the biggest sign of Microsoft's impending fall is the fact that idiot business guys are in charge now.
All the geeks that made Microsoft the behemoth that it is today are gone.
Ballmer and co are all that's left and it has been showing.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Hardly. Everyone with half a brain in the PC market takes Microsoft seriously as it is, they don't need to beg. It's foolish not to take the vendor of the standard OS seriously, after all.
It's funny, though, the position Microsoft is in. Being the industry standard, they have the luxury of letting vendors write drivers for them (unlike the Linux folks). But as they're finding out, this also puts them at the mercy of the vendors. Delicious irony, I'd say. I wonder if this will lead to Microsoft writing drivers themselves in the future?
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
No, but they do have the power to write drivers themselves (carrot) and they do have the power to maintain a public knowledge base of third-party driver problems (stick).
Microsoft is only in this mess because they've been pawning that responsibility off on OEMs for years.
Well, MS does have one major competitor, which has caused nontrivial trouble lately: its own older OSes. As much as I'd like it to be otherwise, I don't think that MS is under much immediate threat from Linux or OSX. However, watching the rather pitiful attempt to get the Vista launch off the ground suggested quite strongly that MS has a real problem with pushing its "ecosystem partners" to upgrade in sync. The whole Vista Read/Vista Capable thing, where MS basically screwed over buyers and retailers to let Intel unload their old graphics chips, the fact that NVidia couldn't be bothered to have drivers that actually worked for months after launch, having to extend XP availability several times, etc.
MS isn't going anywhere; but they face a real risk of getting bogged down in their own backwards compatibility. With Vista, they ran into the nasty trap of not being able to muster enough customer enthusiasm to drive support from hardware and software vendors, and not having enough support from hardware and software vendors to ensure safe upgrades for their customers. Vicious circle time. They'll pull through; because they have the bulk and the power; but that isn't a pretty dynamic.
No, but they do have the power to write drivers themselves (carrot)...
What? MS would have the same problem as Linux does, just to a lesser degree. HW manufactures would have to provide specs to MS, something they haven't done for Linux. The only saving grace would be that MS would be capable of signing an NDA with them.
Microsoft is only in this mess because they've been pawning that responsibility off on OEMs for years.
"You create a device, you write the driver" seems like a perfectly reasonable policy to me, at least for manufactures that don't open their specs to all.
Microsoft needs to be worried about it's own quality control issues first.
Network copies were REALLY broken when Vista was released. Copying files to and from a network was excruciatingly slow - how did that get past Microsoft's QA?
Explorer still occasionally shits the bed for no apparent reason. Why is explorer still the shell of the operating system? Someone should tell Microsoft that Netscape is no longer a threat to them.
There are a ton of BONE-HEADED design decisions in Vista (try selecting a wireless network with less than 5 or 6 clicks).
The ugly truth is that hardware manufacturers are not the cause of Vista's "perception problem". Vista is the cause of Vista's perception problems.
-ted
How's Linux's 0.91% market share feeling?
Christ. You make the rest of us who use Linux look bad.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
We first take the chance to declare you the cultprits of the vista fiasco, bad hardware makers!.
Now please be a good boy and support Vista 7 right away, we know this is a sudden move with so few months left for the beginning of 2009 and you are still trying to support Vista. But now we decided to release another OS, so bitch please support that one already, thanks.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
The manufacturers should spend more time collaborating with the Ubuntu and Mandriva communities. Windows 7 will suck no matter how much effort the manufacturers put into it. Why waste the extra time on a sinking ship?
My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my Father! Prepare to die!
Intro: "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."
Interesting.
Meanwhile, Linux driver developers are begging to write drivers (at no cost) for hardware OEMs.
http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS6669895837.html
As a hardware OEM, you would have to be thinking that it is going to cost you way, way less to get a working driver for your new product written for Linux.
But it's apparently worth your time to post and come back to check for responses.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Bullshit.
When I can throw my Digisuite DTV into a Linux box and have it work I'll believe this, until then "Linux supports more devices (minus one) than any OS ever"
Take Windows 7 seriously? You mean, like they took XP 64 seriously? Yup, we'll have this fully supported in no time ;-)
"You're awefully cute, but unfortunately for you, you're made of meat."
C'mon, it's an anonymous coward posting about Obama, you weren't seriously expecting something other than a breathless screed about how he is a tax and spend marxist socialist communist jew banker fifth columnist babykiller liberal terrorist, were you?
in the last few years /. has steadily slipped into a pathetic site posting the same agenda driven crap, with little to no value
time to find a better news site
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Isn't Microsoft supposed to be the poster child for things like this? "You can't get drivers on Linux because of NDAs, etc." If you _can_ get NDAs and you _are_ filthy rich, and would like to make a superior product, go out and DO IT. Not whine and beg.
MS at least could do it if HW vendors would cooperate, which many would. But at the same time it's not like MS could just dump money into this and have it be sustainable; maintaining drivers for all the HW out there they want to support would be an enormous effort.
Making a wild guess, I wouldn't be surprised if it'd double the cost of Windows. (I seem to remember driver code being at least about half of the size of the Linux kernel, so this guess isn't completely out there.) HW would be cheaper, but basically people who buy little and/or common hardware would be subsidizing the cost of driver development for people who got more exotic hardware. I think it makes far more sense to tie the cost of developing the driver with the HW that it's for.
Also remember the "you create a device, you write the driver, we change the API, we beg you to update all your drivers to the latest beta API, with all nifty DRMs and UACs."
There's a new version of Windows issued what, every 3 years on average? (At least now that 9x and NT have converged.) Let's see, NT 4 was late '96, 2000 was 2000, XP was 2001, Vista was very late 2006 or very early 2007. 4 versions in 10 years, so just over 3 years is about right. (Windows 7 is scheduled for late 2009 or early 2010, which is about another 3 years.) The driver model changes even less frequently. (E.g. my impression is that you can use basically the same code for 2000 and XP.)
Not only that, but the changes for Vista were largely rather for the better, with MS trying to push most drivers out into userspace (where they can't cause bluescreens).
Contrast this situation to Linux, which almost has a stated goal to NOT have a stable driver API. This works fine for them, but if what you want is a stable kernel interface Windows is about as stable as you're going to get.
...I'd be already over this after just having had to do it all on Vista. Now they're going to have to go through the same thing immediately, which I suspect most of them won't bother doing, thinking "oh, it's years away from release".
I don't know if Vista driver support has improved significantly since its release (surely it has; I'm still happily running XP), but I suspect there's still a lot of consumer demand for certain/older driver fixes for Vista that are still on the TODO list for many hardware developers.
What do you mean "measurable?" It's just a catchy thing to say, rallying cry, something for a magazine title and so on.
If you don't know what you're doing, you can't make mistakes.
Just because it's easy doesn't mean device manufacturers couldn't come across unforseen issues if they don't test.
Or better yet: they could demand all devices conform to a set standard and then produce drivers for standard hardware only.
There is no reason for printers to all have different ways to talk to the OS. Same goes for scanners. This could all be standardized.
I suspect the reason they haven't done this before is that having 1000 devices all needing different drivers is a huge advantage for the incumbent OS. Unfortunately for Microsoft that incumbent OS is XP not Vista so it's all come back to bite them.
How about this:
Switching printers when the ludicrously overpriced cartridge is empty would be way too easy if you didn't have to install new drivers and support software?
The eeePC showed that linux works fine as a preinstalled OS. Its driver structure doesn't change every release in an unpredictable way. That makes it very attractive for computer makers. Microsoft really fears that the eeePC would be the first of a new kind of cheap low specs PCs
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
I think that the lesson here is that hardware support is very variable, on any OS.
I bought a digital TV card for my box at home, running Kubuntu, and it was the simplest installation of anything I have ever done. Pop it in, it just worked. No driver installs, no nothing.
I also bought a cheap webcam. On Linux, plug and go. On Windows, even the supplied disk of drivers failed to install (Error -1: Could not configure driver or some such nonsense), and then the drivers from the website regularly cause BSOD.
On the other hand, the in-built sound system (some Intel chipset) on my home box is complete pain in the ass under Linux. I've never got the mike input to work properly.
It is nice to see that some hardware makers are beginning to actively support Linux, or at least allow Linux developers to actively support their stuff by supplying test units and documentation.
Sean Ellis
Follow OfQuack's antics on Twitter.
This approach has worked very well with USB mass storage devices. The same driver talks to my camera, external hard drive, memory stick and Ogg Vorbis player. It doesn't seem to have stifled innovation any.
Sean Ellis
Follow OfQuack's antics on Twitter.
Some browsers no support having more than one window open at a time. You might try to get one of those.
Some websites have the ability to login and make a submission on the same page and at the same time!! Slashdot might want to try to make it so their website is usable.
Whilst saying "You create a device, you write the driver" is perfectly reasonable, it's less reasonable to say, "We're releasing yet another version of Windows. We need new drivers for all of your hardware. Go away and write them for us".
This means a lot of extra expenditure for the hardware manufacturers every time that Microsoft release a new version of Windows. Is it surprising that they might be a bit reluctant to comply?
You realize what they're really asking... they want OEMS to spend $250K+ of their OWN MONEY so that EACH device they've ever sold works nicely with Windows 7 and MICROSOFT looks good.
All the Linux detractors really think about that...
Now think where linux would be if hardware manufacturers spent 1/10 that much contributing drivers to Linux for each device they sold versus the zero they contribute now.
What kind of innovation are you expecting in a mass storage device? You write blocks to them and read blocks back. There are a few things that can be improved - for example allowing the device to re-order requests for more efficient transfers - but not a huge amount.
Now, compare that with graphics cards. We actually have a standard for these, the VESA BIOS Extensions. This defines a way of initialising the framebuffer, setting the resolution, and even some acceleration functions, such as Bit Blt, off-screen sprites, hardware cursors, and even drawing 2D polygons. A modern GPU doesn't bother implementing this, however, since you don't want to use such a primitive interface.
Think about the new features that have been added to GPUs in the last ten years. Hardware tranform, clipping and lighting. Pixel shaders. Vertex shaders. Geometry shaders. Removing the fixed-function pipeline and emulating it with shaders. In the early '90s, a cheap graphics card was just a framebuffer, and an expensive one had commands like 'copy this region of memory to here in the framebuffer', and 'draw a line from here to here' - really expensive ones had enough memory for double-buffering. Now, they are complex stream-vector processors. The VBE acceleration standard defined in 1996 seems hopelessly archaic now. In contrast, USB storage devices in 1996 stored blocks and retrieved blocks. USB storage devices now store blocks, and retrieve blocks.
A standard interface for storage devices is easy. IDE lasted for two decades. A standard interface for video is much harder. Even sound has changed a lot, with the addition of 2, then 4, then 5.1 then 7.1 channels, hardware mixing, spacial positioning, signal processing for effects, resampling, and so on all being added. Sure, you could create a standard like AC97 which just lets you output and record sound, but that limits devices to the lowest common denominator.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
As I recall, Billy Gates was still around when the Vista debacle began. But I take your point. You need a good balance of suits and geeks in any technology company, I've personally witnessed several tech companies brought to their knees because they demoted, fired or released the geeks from upper management roles, and ignored product design, planning and schedules in the name of marketing features.
Salut,
Jacques
The only saving grace would be that MS would be capable of signing an NDA with them.
That kinda implies that the barrier for Linux drivers is the lack of devs willing to sign an NDA. AFAIK, that's not often the case. In fact, from what I remember hearing, there have been quite a few developers willing to sign an NDA in order to get documentation -- but manufacturers just don't want the help of the OSS community. MS has the upper hand because 1) they're a corporation, not a random collection of developers and 2) they have money.
The real litigious bastards...