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Internal Emails Released In Vista Capable Debacle
An anonymous reader writes "As previously discussed, Microsoft's attempt to shield itself from further discovery over the Windows Vista Capable debacle has failed and more internal emails have been released. Although Microsoft has successfully kept CEO Steve Ballmer away from the witness stand on grounds the he 'has no unique knowledge of the facts in this case,' emails suggest otherwise. An email was released in which Intel CEO Paul Otellini thanks Ballmer for listening and making changes to the program allowing their 915 chipset to pass the grade: 'I know you did it.'"
Did anyone doubt that Microsoft and Intel are in cahoots? I mean, seriously, what cave have these people been hiding in for the last 20 years?
My blog
People want cheap computers with the latest and greatest technology, and OEM's want to maintain as high of a margin as possible. These fundamental conflicts of interest cause these kinds of problems.
Shattered expectations aren't limited to computers either. Ever bought something that you should have spent more money on? I have a snowblower at home that's so underpowered that shoveling takes less time.
My personal belief is that this problem is to blame on hardware manufacturers and OEM's trying, and horribly failing, to deliver what consumers desire (fast computers with brand new technology) and maintain their profit margins (which can't be done for a fast computer at $399 in a retail store).
And what do we do about it? We bash Microsoft. In fact, we bash them so well that everyone, including people who have never used it and those who currently use it (without major issue) that Vista is not a viable choice for them.
Fast forward to December, 2009. Windows 7, which is almost entirely based on the now very stable (dare I say mature) Vista codebase. Not only will it improve perception of Windows due to its excellent compatibility and well honed kernel, it'll force me to shell out cash (unless I can get a Microsoft handout, which is how I got Vista) for the latest Microsoft OS, and prematurely outdate every single Windows License companies have bought in the meantime.
Want Windows Vista SP4...err, I mean Windows 7? $299 please.
We have no one to blame but ourselves.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
Stickers that changed from "Vista Capable" to "Designed for XP" on the day Vista shipped are sleazy, but the larger issue is worse: M$ KILLED INTEL'S GRAPHICS MARKET. What the hell was wrong with Vista that it could not do translucency on Intel chip sets? E16 has been doing translucency in 2D land for a decade, so Vista should have gracefully dealt with the few missing pieces in Intel's chip sets. I know that 3D gaming works well enough on the previous generation of Intel under GNU/Linux, and suspect that's the rub. M$ killed Intel's ambitious drive to produce graphics chipsets because Intel had released the drivers as free software. HP moved away before Vista shipped, but that was not enough to keep Vista from sucking on HP anyway. For daring once to do for free software what they routinely do for M$, Intel has been driven out of the graphics market. The "favor" of letting Intel sell a bunch of hardware for an OS that would never use it should be judged in this light.
It was hosted by a local IT shop looking to introduce new technologies to potential clients. There was a Microsoft guy there talking about Server 08. He used one of the talking points that really annoys me: "Yeah, I used to work in open source, played with Linux and stuff. But then I decided I actually wanted to make money." Huh? Ok, that argument might have held water years and years back but it doesn't even make sense these days. Yes, Vista was a failure but Microsoft is still here and even the most pessimistic of realistic assessments doesn't have them going away anytime soon. They may be the 600lb gorilla instead of the 800lb gorilla but that's still a whole lotta gorilla. But to dismiss open source so, well, dismissively?
If watching the tech industry has taught me anything it's that nobody's indomitable and it pays not to get cocky. And the bigger a company gets, the more entrenched the bureaucracy, the more potent the kool-aid, the less likely it becomes to pull out of a tailspin. A company becomes functionally incapable of not fucking up. There's no way to turn the company around apart from firing every manager and starting over but those managers are exactly the ones who will fire everyone else in the company until they are the last ones left in the bunker. We're seeing this play out with the American automotive manufacturers right now, the Japanese are proving it's possible to make cars and make money at the same time while the Americans are busy proving it can't be done. Hell, our whole country is going through this same kind of dysfunctional malaise right now.
My prediction is that Microsoft will, over the next fifteen years, shrink in preeminence until it is a 400lb gorilla, dominant in certain niches but more comparable in size and power to the other big name IT companies rather than the world-shaker it was at its prime.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
It's a culture problem, not what tools are being used. Most of these foreign programmers are very good at following orders. The problem is that they're very bad at taking initiative; They want/need management approval to do much more than go to the bathroom. This is true for most eastern countries; People are more collectivistic by nature. Engineers in this country are taught to think critically and independently, and often clash with their managers. But the result is better engineering. As some non-engineering examples -- look at the Three Gorges Dam, which has a number of serious engineering deficiencies, arguably due to cultural differences -- nobody was willing to question their superiors. Of course, if I lived in China, I wouldn't either for obvious reasons.
Here's an article that says it far better than I do. ahref=http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Companies_should_avoid_culture_shock/articleshow/2811348.cmsrel=url2html-26813http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Companies_should_avoid_culture_shock/articleshow/2811348.cms> What I'm saying is that the horde technique churns out lackluster code, not the people used... though culture contributes to the problem.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Shit, hit submit instead of preview.
Also from the memo, from an Email Poole sent around MS:
Essentially, Intel knew for about three years that their crappy integrated graphics wouldn't be up to snuff, but did nothing because the 915 chipset was raking in billions in profit for themselves.
Intel fucked Microsoft, fucked the OEMs, and fucked consumers. Intel should be facing a massive lawsuit from all three of those parties.
If I were Microsoft and the OEMs I'd also be doing everything I could to stop doing business with Intel.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
To be fair, a large part of why Intel graphics suck on Windows has to do with architectural issues on the Microsoft end of things. If Intel chips were lacking the raw power for Glass, I suppose they wouldn't be able to run Compiz either, but here I am, typing this from an Eee with Compiz Fusion enabled on my Intel i915-based chipset.
At the risk of stating the obvious...
Not to say that Intel's a victim here, but perhaps the raw numbers for "Vista Capable" are just too high.
~ C.
I haven't worked at MS either, but I did know a guy who worked on MS Outlook for them for a while. His assessment of the organization was much like what "girlintraining" detailed.
I remember one time, he told me how they had problems with promoting people internally. Developers didn't WANT to get a promotion that meant they'd become a "project lead" - and thereby be held accountable for all the problems. (Not to mention, the raises weren't deemed worth the additional hours they'd get stuck putting in.)
Somehow it seems to escape Microsoft that the public resistance to to Office 2007 and rejection of Vista are more than negative reactions to those products. It is a shift in general public view of Microsoft in general. In the tech/geek sector, we have been aware of Microsoft's problems and shortcomings for a long time -- even if you are a fan-boy in denial. But the public historically been oblivious to the whole mess... Windows and the blue "e" just means computer and internet. Not so any more... Now the public is awakening. Apple is picking up a lot more interest and Microsoft has an entire IMAGE to rebuild, not just a couple of products.
Or the fact that Microsoft is composed of little fiefdoms and each major "team" often has a snapshot of code from other teams that doesn't get synced? E.g., Windows teams use a compiler that is older than the dev tools team is creating, Office uses DLL code that's been branched/modified/extended from the WIndows Shell, and is quite incompatible (ditto on dev tools as well). Which is why you can end up with 3 incompatible versions of the same DLL - one that ships with Windows, one that ships with Office, and another one that developers use for their projects (that ships with Visual Studio) - I believe one such DLL is common controls or common dialogs.
Or how about this - Office 2007 introduced the ribbon. A third-party developed a library to emulate the ribbon. Said library was purchased by Microsoft to be provided with Visual Studio? Thus, developers will be using a different ribbon library than what the Office people use, and who knows what horrible merge the Windows team will (eventually) use?
So not only is DLL hell created from different versions of a DLL with the same code lineage, there's also the troubles caused by the same DLL with different code lineages living on the same system.
If you ever worked with people from other countries from serious companies you'd see that these people are not trained according to their culture but to the company's culture. First, name calling is pretty childish, and we're trying to discuss this as professionals. Second, does working for the 33rd largest company in this country qualify me? It's Target (TGT), by the way, an international retail establishment, and I worked there for two years doing (amongst other things) development work. Let me give some examples from my professional experience there: - My department was not allowed to develop a database in-house to do incident and call tracking. It was assigned to a team of 14 developers in India, and they worked on it for 16 months. When we finally got the product back it had none of the features we requested built into it, ran on .NET, and had a record limit of 64k records. Note, this was not a 64k record limit per database but for all databases that that software used. After consulting with two programmers on-site who were familiar with .NET, we concluded that we could have developed it in-house in about 2 weeks, with another 2 weeks for testing, using a team of... two programmers. But management declined our offer (again) "because it would cost too much".
- I was assigned to do software deployments on the overnight shift. I worked two people from "a third world". They were highly educated, naturalized citizens of this country... And despite numerous improvements to the tools and process that I made that would have resulted in a nearly 10x increase in problem resolutions, they stuck with what they knew. Even when I sat with them to explain the new tools, they steadfastly refused to use them out of an apparent fear that someone above us would punish them. I wound up doing about 80% of the night shift work for about 6 months, mostly using custom scripts, while they slaved away at their administation tasks by hand. They were both eventually let go when we downsized. I liked them, I did, but I couldn't convince them for anything to try something new. ... I could go on, but there's a size limit to posts on slashdot.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
They should have had an Aero capable sticker.
Windows Se7en It'll kill your wife, cut her head off, gift wrap it, send it to you, and allow you to edit the movie in Windows Movie Maker like never before!
I finally get around to renting Se7en, avoiding any spoilers, threatening my friends if they tell me any details and then I get pwned on /.
:P
There's a moral in the lesson somewhere.
Ah well
Unfortunately NASA only learned their lesson for a short time. When Columbia happened, initially people bashed the engineers for that failure. Why didn't they spot the damage? Why didn't they do anything about it? Well, most people didn't realize the internal power struggles and politics that were occurring. Engineers did notice the foam strike the wing. They tried to get more information.
They asked for an EVA to check the damage. Too risky.
They asked to redirect a satellite to take pictures of the wing. Too expensive.
They asked to delay the return flight for more time to study the problem. That would be bad for PR. (Yes, a NASA manager actually argued that).
NASA managers at the time were more concerned about the PR around delaying a return for safety concerns than the actual safety concerns.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Yeah, no shit.
Maybe the term WIN in the title of the product means it's meant to run on a WINdows platform.
Kind of like purchasing a Ford transmission and wondering why it doesn't just slide into your GM.
Bitching that a product DESIGNED for Windows didn't work on a non Windows system. Man, are you for real?
--Toll_Free
In fact I do know what I'm saying. Microsoft failed to segment the market properly. The built the technology and assumed people would do as they're told and buy it at different prices in different colored boxes. Instead, the people with the most clout balked, and demanded XP.
If you remember, a lot of companies used Windows 9x for a long time after they were "supposed" to go to NT. That was fine. Microsoft still had the bases covered. The Vista roll-out was more like they had tried to discontinue non-NT windows, rather than introducing Windows 95. The result would have been the same: people would have demanded Windows 3 be continued.
I don't see any evidence that home users care about the glitz, or that anybody really cares (in economic terms) about the gloss. There are some worthwhile architectural changes to Vista, it's just too much of an all things for all people project. A narrower focus would result in a more satisfactory niche product (as NT) that could colonize various niches (as NT 4 did), and morph into a widely acceptable corporate OS (as Windows 2000 and XP did) when hardware caught up and the kinks were ironed out.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
There is public resistance to Office 2007?
Have you seen its sales figures?
Note that, unlike the case with Vista, there's no downgrade license for Office 2007, so that explanation doesn't fly. And neither it is bundled with sold PCs.