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HP's Fury At Vista Capable Downgrade
More documents are coming out in court proceedings over the Vista Capable debacle. Internetnews.com has good coverage of HP's fury over Microsoft lowering the requirements for a Vista Capable sticker, at Intel's request. "Intel officials may have been pleased that Microsoft lowered standards for obtaining the company's Windows Vista Capable logo program sticker, but the same can't be said about HP's execs. 'I can't be more clear than to say you not only let us down by reneging on your commitment to stand behind the [device driver model] requirement, you have demonstrated a complete lack of commitment to HP as a strategic partner and cost us a lot of money in the process,' said one e-mail from Richard Walker, the senior vice president of HP's consumer business unit, to [Microsoft executives]." PCPro.co.uk follows the trail of accusatory emails inside Microsoft from there: "HP's email prompted then Microsoft co-President, Jim Allchin, to send a furious email of his own to company CEO Steve Ballmer. Allchin's email suggests the decision to lower the requirements was made in his absence by Ballmer, following 'a call between you and Paul [Otellini, Intel CEO].' 'I am beyond being upset here,' Allchin wrote to Ballmer. 'What a mess. Now we have an upset partner, Microsoft destroyed credibility [sic], as well as my own credibility shot.' Ballmer, in turn, blamed another Microsoft executive, Will Poole, in a rather erratically typed reply to Allchin."
It doesn't have the graphics power to run Aero. Intel instructed Microsoft to remove that as a requirement for the "Vista Capable" sticker. Microsoft agreed, despite previously telling ATI, Nvidia, and HP that they would not remove that requirement, even for Intel.
Their own managers got screwed by this. From Information Week:
http://www.informationweek.com/news/windows/operatingsystems/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=212100310
In another e-mail, Microsoft Windows product manager Mike Nash said even he was fooled by the campaign: "I personally got burned by the Intel 915 chipset issue on a laptop that I personally" bought "with my own $$$." Nash said he purchased the Sony laptop "because it had the Vista logo and was pretty disappointed."
"I now have a $2,100 e-mail machine," Nash complained.
Nothing new here. Another day. Another episode demonstrating that there are no ethics or leadership at the top of this company. Just a bunch of ignorant whores.
According to Intel, the i915 chipset does not have a native hardware scheduler and hence cannot fully support the WDDM design. I believe there were alpha versions of WDDM drivers for i915 but they only supported a subset of WDDM features and were scrapped early in the project.
:)
I reckon it is actually possible to have full WDDM on i915, but the performance would be absolutely horrible because the scheduling would have to be done in the driver - and we all know how zippy Intel drivers are
Because HP had already made an investment in a more expensive (capable) product line based on the promises of MS. Now HP would have to compete against vendors offering less-powerful systems that could be also advertised as "Vista Capable", even though not actually capable according to the original definition.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Here's the emails the story mentions but fails to link