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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."
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?
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!
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
Yes... and try installing Windows XP on a RAID array without using a driver floppy disk. Even Houdini couldn't pull that one off! Linux on the other hand is a breeze. The array is automatically detected and the appropriate drivers are installed and initialized.
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.
Maybe the community should just step up and write them? I mean they do it for Linux, why not Microsoft?
Yes, why dont they? There are obviously far more Windows users out there to be affected by antiquated hardware.
Maybe the community should just step up and write them? I mean they do it for Linux, why not Microsoft?
'Cause it's Microsoft. Really, there's no other reason than that. Why should we reward their reprehensible behaviour by adding valuable functionality to their systems?
If they don't have developers, their operating systems are useless. : D
you do realize that much of the "hardware" we have today is little more than application specific instruction processors (ASIPs) and memory on a board (or SoC). For these hardware devices, much of the development work is in the firmware running on the processors. Oh, and much of that code was probably written by the processor vendor, and likely was obtained under a license agreement that doesn't allow you to release it. Now, if the hardware device contains flash or an eeprom, this isn't really an issue, as the code for these processors can be stored on there. However, many store the program data in the driver. This has a couple advantages, it's cheaper to manufacture the device (fewer components), more reliable (fewer components to fail) and if a bug is discovered in the ASIP code, the manufacturer can release new device drivers that automatically update the firmware of the device, without forcing the user to manually update it. Seems like device manufacturers would have to be stupid not to upload binary blobs to their devices. These binary blobs can't be open source for the reasons outlined above, and thus the device driver cannot be added to the linux kernel.
Phil
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.
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.
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.