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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."
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.
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
Maybe Microsoft should do what the Linux community does. Work with manufacturers to get the drivers written and then maintain the drivers for the manufacturers forever.
Ya, that's likely.
BTW - I own two webcams now. Neither work under Windows since I lost the driver disk (and those drivers were useless under XP64/Vista anyway), but they both work just fine under Linux. What's the world coming to?!
How we know is more important than what we know.
Nearly 2009 and we still can't plug in a printer and have it just work. The idea that any printer - consumer or professional - needs proprietary drivers that might have problems with Windows 7 is really sad. We need more standard HID devices, and better HID support in OSes.
Had the same thing with a cheap ass bluetooth dongle someone gave me. Lost the driver disc, so it got shoved in a box of junk. Been a while since I'd checked that box and no longer use windows as my primary desktop. So after doing a clean up one day I figured, well my pc is turned on so no harm in trying it... Plugged it in, the little bluetooth symbol appeared next to the clock and hey presto it worked!! That was compared to the many many hours spent trying to find a working driver for windows!
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of cats. MEOW!!
After all the runaround with drivers for Vista, they completely changed the driver model again?
What kind of idiots are they employing?
No sig today...
The biggest problem when Vista was released was shitty Nvidia and Creative drivers. Nvidia drivers were responsible for 50% of vista crashes when it first came out, hence people thought vista was unstable and crap. MS doesn't want a repeat of this for win7.
Maybe Microsoft should do what the Linux community does. Work with manufacturers to get the drivers written and then maintain the drivers for the manufacturers forever.
Maybe the community should just step up and write them? I mean they do it for Linux, why not Microsoft? Plus, for any device supported under Linux, the hardest part of the work is already done... figuring out how to communicate with the device.
And don't whine about driver signing, if a large OSS group came to MS with a large body of updated drivers for x64, they'd take them in a heartbeat, sign them, and even stick them on the next Windows CD if we let them.
BTW - I own two webcams now. Neither work under Windows since I lost the driver disk (and those drivers were useless under XP64/Vista anyway), but they both work just fine under Linux. What's the world coming to?!
The difference is the manufacturer abandoned the hardware a couple years ago for Windows, while they never bothered to support Linux at all in the first place. So the community stepped up for Linux, because that was the only way it was going to happen, while the manufacturers did a passable job long enough for the hardware to be non-mainstream enough that most people really don't care.
I think the biggest sign of Microsoft's impending fall is the fact that idiot business guys are in charge now.
It's interesting you'd point that out. I was thinking something similar. Mostly in the way the request was worded. I've spent some time around inept managers and you can see a lot of the same in the summary:
"urging device manufacturers to start immediate testing with its pre-beta release" - Translation: Get on the ball and do our work for us.
"to avoid the widespread hardware compatibility problems that contributed so much to the negative perception of Vista" - Translation: Our failures are not our fault. They are your fault. Get on the ball and fix it.
"'There is not another WinHEC planned before Windows 7 is released,' Microsoft has warned them." - Translation: We have you by the balls. Don't make us squeeze. We want you to do things for our benefit, and we're unwilling to wait, or even to ask nicely.
Now, in contrast what they should have done is this.
Windows 7 is being released, and soon. Yeah, we screwed the pooch with Vista. But we'd like to fix things, and we'd like your help. Towards that end we are making a pre-release version of Windows 7 beta available to developers so we can make something that has the promise of Vista, but actually delivers. And we'll be holding several WinHEC sessions, to help you, our valued partners make this next Windows the best product it can be.
Engage us as coder geeks, and we would be far more happy to comply. Speak to us - geek to geek. Let us know why Windows 7 is exciting. And admit your mistakes with Vista, so you have some credibility when you try to engage us.
Of course, inept power happy managers would never say such a thing. And it's the product that suffers. I've seen it before, just never quite on this scale before. Treat your developers like peons and they will abandon you. Programmers tend to be a little rogue in their perceptions. I can see a great many people reading that press release and thinking "well screw that crap".
I certainly would.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
What is with all these Slashdot users who "lost the driver disc"?
The first thing I do with any driver disc (or any other software, for that matter) is copy it to my install respository that sits on a RAID array and is backed up regularly. I pretty much never clean that up, so I have drivers for hardware I don't own anymore.
A quick check shows I have Soundblaster drivers from 14 years ago.
Despite being such a pack rat, and literally keeping everything there (like install source for the last 3 versions of MS Office, every game I've ever purchased, etc.), it only takes up 330GB, which is less than $50 worth of disk space.
Its an application like any other that can be killed, move, restarted, or even removed.
Except, of course, for the fact that killing the "root" explorer.exe ends up causing you pretty ugly problems.
For example, when you kill off the explorer.exe process controlling your taskbar and system tray, starting Explorer again usually leaves you with a mess, since the running tasks don't go back into the tray. Then, too, everything that was in the various "autorun" places gets run again because Explorer is too dumb to figure out this isn't the first time it is being run.
Basically, because Explorer is the display shell and hooks into so damn much, but it isn't really the root process for your login, the whole setup is so fragile that the only way to make sure everything ends up right is to log out and log back in.
OK, so you don't install the device at all, in which case drivers don't matter.
Seriously, if I download newer drivers, then the same thing happens to them...they get stashed away. And, when it turns out that version 2.4 of the driver screws up the hardware, I can always revert to version 2.3 (or 2.0, or 1.8, etc.). It doesn't matter to me where the hardware came from...the driver gets saved away.
And, if I bought hardware that didn't work regardles of the driver, it gets returned. So, I wouldn't have had a "rubbish little device" sitting around to work a few years later once Linux got around to supporting it.
Maybe the community should just step up and write them?
Why should the community "just step in" and write them? We pay for that stuff, it should work under Windows because they're mostly dedicated to home users and about 90% of them run Windows. Sounds reasonable enough for me that the hardware manufacturers should "bother" to write proper Windows drivers.
(I've checked with Google before punching in that number)
I know you're joking, but there will never be a Year of the Linux Desktop until there's a clear definition of what it actually means. If it's not measurable, there's nothing to aim for and it'll forever just be a joke.
Considering that actually measuring the real use of Linux on the desktop would be an expensive proposition requiring real data collection (as opposed to sales figures), I would guess that if someone has the commercial incentive to pay for such data collection, they already believe that the results will be useful to them commercially. In other words, Linux will already have made a serious penetration.
Kind of like relationships, sometimes: you already know it's over before you get the message explicitly...