Slashdot Mirror
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."
Many users don't feel comfortable doing an OS install themselves. HP in the past used to sell laptops with SUSE preinstalled. If you're pissed at Microsoft, a letter won't do anything. You're still preinstalling Vista on every computer.
Offer a new line of openSUSE laptops with all the hardware configured and working out of the box (wireless, webcam, etc) and that will send a message to Microsoft.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Hard to argue with HP for being pissed off about this one. The PC market is cutthroat, so making an investment in higher priced integrated and/or discrete graphics chipsets, only to discover at the last moment that your competition has just been given the green light to undersell you with relaxed requirements has got to hurt.
MS was in a lousy position there, with no way to please everybody; but their handling of the situation was surprisingly inelegant. Lots of confusion and behind-one-another's-back talking to partners. I wonder if they messed up, or if they figure that HP et al. will just have to suck it up. One also wonders, at this point, if it wouldn't have been better for MS to just pay Intel to dump the 915s(either literally, or into low-end "emerging markets" products).
Vista is getting support instead of XP for the same reason XP got support instead of Windows 2000.
It's next in line. What did you expect?
Microsoft can and will make you move forward. Forward being a relative term when we're talking Microsoft.
And I'm perfectly aware of the reasons not to use Vista. Which is why I removed it from my computer.
Year after year, I maintain the feeling that Windows is teetering on the brink. The immense army of Microsoft's R&D organisation is employed to add "differentiators", i.e. more features, rather than less, so you'll always have planned obsolesence. This is inconsistent with getting the price per unit down to where it's competitive in the TCO equation they're selling to. At the Enterprise back office, it's still perceived by most of our customers that a Windows server solution is easier to plug together in a scalable way with the fewest possible high-end engineers. Because of this perception (aided by a very good single-source support portal in MSDN with a lot of expensive polish) many of our Enterprise customers see a Windows desktop -- at whatever level of evolution -- is the client of least resistance. This amounts to a lot of technology knitted together with a glue consisting of 1 part content, 1 part support, and 1 part marketing polish.
As far as overall quality and ease, well, you and I know different.
To make Linux prevail across the Enterprise will require a differentiator, something that can compensate for the immense marketing engine that is MSFT. This will have to be not just a convincing alternative, but a convincing argument that is driven home.
A couple of holdouts keep MSFT on the cliff instead of off it. A diminishing yet prevalent feeling of product consistency across the board (reinforced by their consistent portal graphics, I kid you not), the immense momentum of the installed product base and the fact that the users' home devices can run World of Warcraft on that platform and no other.
The cost equation is at present very much in favour of a Linux desktop + **Nix back end. Unless we somehow counter that marketing engine, however, we'll never be able to give the beast that last push over the cliff. And we'll need to do it in some other way than they do -- remember, it took a year-after-year consistency for Volkswagen to break the tailfin aristocracy of the 1950's car makers. Of course by that time planned obsolescence had reached absurd levels and people were ready for the change.
Maybe that's our marketing message -- "Do you really need the tailfins? Or would a simple, economical desktop do the job?"
If any marketing types out there have the links, it would be great to see some of the old VW beetle adverts. Inspirational simplicity.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear