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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.'"
Those witness stand chairs are bolted down right?
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?
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Cover me in peppers and lick me, baby.
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.
is that Microsoft has, in the past, successfully navigated this kind of situation before. In fact, they were the beneficiary.
Remember OS/2? Highly regarded for its technical quality, however it required a princely amount of RAM. Ideally you needed something like 8MB of RAM, back in the day when this added over $500 in current era dollars to the price of the system. Add this to the cost of the OS itself, and you didn't have high adoption.
Microsoft did a classic market segmentation move: they had Windows 3.1, which ran in 2MB of RAM, and NT 3.x, which ran in 8MB, and provided easy upgrade paths between the two products.
What seems really ... odd to me today is the way Microsoft is trying to segment and position its markets. All this Vista Home/Professional/Ultimate business. You may think Windows 3 was a POS, but it addressed a legitimate market segment: people who didn't wanted to do basic computing tasks without dropping the better part of a thousand dollars more for a more powerful system. There may have been all kinds of good reasons for them to go with a better system, but they had other uses for the money.
I look at a box of Windows Vista Super-Duper Ultimate, festooned with bullets, sitting next to Vista Business, Vista Home Premium and Vista Home Basic, and I'm supposed to sort myself into the appropriate market segment by studying the bullets festooning each package. What in the world were they thinking? Don't they study their own history?
Going by their own history, they should release Windows Basic and Windows Advanced. Windows Basic would be XP stripped down to nothing and capable of running in 512MB of RAM on any chipset manufactured in the last five years. Windows Advanced would be Vista with all the bells and whistles and need the latest and greatest chipsets.
I'd make Windows Basic really cheap, but make network login and sharing an add-on, so that corporations who wanted to use it would pay something between the cost of Windows Basic and Windows Advanced, and feel like they're getting a deal. Even the UAC business would have been less of fiasco here. People who wanted to take their chances could go with Windows Basic. IT Departments choosing Windows Advanced could piously tell their users that they were being protected from harm.
Microsoft failed with Vista because they wanted to drag the world onto a product it wasn't ready for, and tried to segment the market in totally meaningless ways.
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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 I purchase a product because it will work with X. And it does not work with X, then I have been harmed. I am out the money paid for the product. If the vendor promised me the product would work with X, and knew the product would, in fact, fail horribly with X. That's usually called fraud. In any event, I am due a full refund of the purchase price, and potentially some recompense for the time lost and aggravation caused by the vendor being a dipshit. Generally speaking, if a product fails to perform as a vendor advertises, they will refund your money *and* offer you some form of apology, be it verbal, or in the form of monetary gain.(gift cards, 10% off next purchase and the like)