158 Pages of Microsoft's Dirty Laundry

KrispyRasher writes "Even internally, Microsoft couldn't agree on what the base requirements to run Vista were, but that didn't stop it from inaccurately promoting the OS as running on some hardware. 158 pages of Microsoft internal emails reveal scandalous truths about the squabbles that took place in the lead up to Vista's launch."

If you think 158 pages is a bit much..

[Idaho]

Microsoft execs on Vista problems [nwsource.com] is an excellent summary of the affair so far.

This class action suit isn't looking too good for Microsoft, I would say (though I'm not a lawyer, fortunately)

Re:The bigger problem is Vista running

[Lingerance]

> Vista is still prone to viruses and Trojans in no small part because M$ still lets it run as root and not need physical password entry to install or run a program. I believe I'm missing something here. UAC will ask you for your password (if set correctly, otherwise it just asks for a confirm/sanity check). Those who are familiar with server will have no problems finding out how to get Vista to behave more like gksudo.

Re:The bigger problem is Vista running

[EvilRyry]

Even the cancel/allow is perfectly fine for most cases. If you are in the admin group it will ask you for the cancel allow which supposedly runs isolated from other apps so that they can't push the allow button for you. If you're not in the admin group, then it prompts you for admin credentials. Its really not that bad of a system except theres no "yes, and leave me alone for the next few minutes while I actually try to get some stuff done with out this freaking thing harassing me every time I try to change a system setting" option.

Limited point of view...

[MyNameIsFred]

...the web browser has become the new OS...the vast majority of people only care about 2 types of files: MP3s and digital photos. Even Word documents are becoming marginalized now...

Many companies for various reasons - safeguarding proprietary information, trade secrets, etc. - have no desire to store their business documents on "Google's servers." Nor do I expect that to change in the near future. And while your assertions about file formats may be true for home users, it certainly is not true for many business users. Word, Excel and Powerpoint are as important as ever in the business world. In this regard, Vista falls flat, previous versions of MS Office have all the functionality needed. Therefore, there is no pressing desire to upgrade.

Re:The bigger problem is Vista running

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

Their "service packs" are the 10.5.x updates. Those are free and add features on top of bug fixes. Something Microsoft has promised the Vista Ultimate customers and failed to follow through with. The 10.x updated are the updates you're thinking about, and they're released every couple of years. We just got Leopard after 2-3 years of Tiger. They're not just bug fixes or UI changes, unlike Microsoft, when Apple says "we're going to add a new file system and change the OS in x, y, and z ways, they change them. Vista is XP with a new hat and a STD.

Re:The bigger problem is Vista running

[Cal Paterson]

Mplayer has always had dvd sub support...at least, for as long as I can remember, and I remember many years. There are also subtitle OCR programs, though some are better than others, and some aren't very good at all. Even if you don't like the unix ones, virtualdub is very well supported through wine, and has been for, again, as long as I can remember.

I don't know what media player classic is, however, but there are lots of good media player programs for unix, and they all share the same libraries with every other player out there. If you're trying to say "Call me when Ubuntu is Windows XP" you're never going to be satisfied, but Ubuntu does all the things you mention, with the exclusion of XFI, which is a terrible SPU anyway.

Re:Maybe 2008 is the year...

[malevolentjelly]

Where are all these people? I'm yet to see any major organization academic or corporate that I've come across think twice about updating to Office 2007- OpenOffice is just something the IT guy brings up in passing- which is usually ignored.

In fact, Office 2007 is just excellent. You can generate simply beautiful documents and presentations extremely fast with it. I use OpenOffice at home, so I've dealt with the fact that it's an okay viewer/editor but for what it's worth everything I make on it looks like utter ass.

Linux could topple Windows and they would still be able to waste OpenOffice with Microsoft Office for those who demand usability and quality.

So OOXML might not become an international standard- what does it matter if everyone in the corporate and academic world is using Microsoft Office? People will likely just save in DOC like they do with openoffice until OOXML is mainstream-- doesn't matter if it's THE STANDARD.

Who out there actually uses ODF? Or even OOXML for that matter? Everyone just uses MS-DOC! The worst case scenario for Microsoft is that they create a Service Pack that adds ODF support for Europe.

I really wish OpenOffice was competitive with Microsoft Office so they would create a free version to compete.

Graphics drivers

[ragnarok]

Check out page 47 of the PDF. There's a pretty interesting table showing the percentage of crashes attributed to each graphics vendor. Nvidia is way out front, with 25% compared to less than 10% for ATI.

Vista IS THE ANSWER!

[Mr.Ballmer]

The Windows Vista CapAble Lawsuit! Whinners! A few of you may have read the stories about several groups of whinny mormons attempting to initiate a class action lawsuit against us for deceptive advertising by allowing PC vendors to slap "Vista CapAble" stickers on crappy low-end PC's. Let's just get the truth out here! Vista was originally supposed to be released prior to the Christmas shopping season '06, but for reasons of our own we had to put off the release until '07 (for Vista this was the 17th and last time we changed the release date). The PC vendors went wild, Mikey Dell fell to his knees before me and pleaded for help, "Half of our sales are during this quarter, people won't buy! They'll wait! Oh my God! Oh my God!" I calmly got him up and said, "Really Mike! I'm not your God! But I do know what you mean, we have a plan! Buck up dude." Still sniffling he whimpered, "Thank you God! What's you plan Bill?" I Replied, "Stop calling me that!" I sat him down in MY chair and explained, "You guys can just slap a sticker on the low-end crap! Have it say 'Windows Vista CapAble', the half decent ones slap 'Premium Ready" on 'em!" Sounding worried he stuttered, "those boat anchors won't run Vista". I looked him straight in the eye, "I have the Nasal toned Nerds (NtN's) down in the basement stripping Vista down to Windows 95! We are gonna' call it Vista Home edition, we'll let them upgrade to that!", we both had a good little chuckle. I went over to him, grabbed a pen and paper and wrote - "CapAble" I winked at him and said "get it?" He stared at it for a few seconds then smiled and slooowly said, "yeah, Cap Able! ... able but with a cap!" He stood and high fived me, he screamed, "Jesus! You are slick!" ... maybe I am, maybe I am!

Re:Intel 910? It's a MS incompetent devs

[ashridah]

Actually, you'll find it's because Aero demands decent pixel shader support to do the blur effect underneath the titlebar (aka, glass). That's the difference between compiz and aero, basically. Aero uses a bunch of pixel shaders, and thus, limits itself as to what cards can do everything. Compiz uses basic transforms (in most cases) instead, and runs on more hardware as a result. (Note, hardware accelerated alpha blending isn't texture-mapped blurring. The latter's a bit more complex)

Which looks better is a matter of subjective opinion. Glass looks nice to me, but then, I only ever have high-end video cards. Some of the compiz effects are nice as well, although quite a few just bring a system to it's knees just as easily as Aero will, and some compiz effects seem fairly pointless. A lot of it is asthetics, although compiz does have some handy ones as well as just visually appealing ones.

ash

Re:"M$ fanbois out here start modding this down"

[Grampaw Willie]

John Kenneth Galbraith said: "In any large organization it is far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right and alone"

and the mod scores on /. demonstrate this as noted in the post above

there are things wrong in the computer business that are in desperate need of attention and which should serve as a great embarrassment to us all, especially the big manufacturers.

Re:"M$ fanbois out here start modding this down"

[glitch23]

You will get flamed AND modded into oblivion if you as much as critisize Apple.

Don't forget the spelling and grammar nazi mods.

Re:OT

[Billly Gates]

It is very slow and I/o intensive and offers little benefit over Vista.

I have a dual core laptop and one program can make Vista feel very unresponsive even if there are two processors. When I downgraded to XP the system still felt responsive and the otehr CPU took things over quite well.

Also on a notebook Vista will just pound on the hard disk randomly for hours at a time for no reason. Running MS resource manager I found out it was running disk defragmenting and registry backup programs very slowly in the background which would eat battery life.

Games are slower and so is video performance.

I have none of these problems after downgrading to XP. XP loads in about 20 seconds and 2 minutes were required on the same system with Vista.

In general one is just really slow and irrating.

Re:Microsoft could have done plenty...

[Keeper]

Make the HTML control optional, rewrite the control panel applets and other shell components that need it to work without it,

They don't use the html control anymore.

and change the tight binding between rendering and access control.

There isn't a tight binding between rendering and access control. Permissions are controlled at a process level.

Provide a "legacy" wrapper for it so that old programs can use the insecure API, but make THAT optional as well.

Yeah, I can see the headline now -- "Microsoft declairs security optional".

Make the DRM optional. Vista without DRM would still use the old XP drivers and remain compatible with XP, but wouldn't have the components to run the latest encrypted media, so give us the option... Basic Vista or Video Vista. If you don't install Windows Media Player, you get WMP 2.0 and a WMV3 codec so you can play most video, but if you want to play HD-DVD you need to take on the full thing.

The DRM is optional. DRM free media still plays fine. If your hardware doesn't meet DRM requirements specified by some set of media, that specific set of media does not play. And XP drivers still work (though functionality that requires driver features not available in XP don't work, such as Aero).

* Bundle Interix with ALL versions of Vista. They could call it "A better UNIX than Linux".

Why? Who cares?

Remove the crippling in Terminal Server, allow multiuser use over networks. If you can't afford to upgrade all your computers to Vista you can use the old ones as terminals to your Windows Home Server.

Yeah, that's a reasonable request. Let's take one of the key features in your high dollar item server product and put it in your $60 desktop os. Anti-trust authorities won't have ANY problem with that. And then you should ask yourself what you get out having 3 computers in your house acting as dumb terminals...

Bundle Visual Studio, in the package, the way Apple bundles XCode and all free UNIXes bundle their compilers. Windows is the last hold out of the horror of the '80s... the compiler-less OS.

Yeah, another reasonable request. Give away several hundred dollars of software for free with Windows. That won't raise any anti-trust issues at all. That being said, commandline .Net tools are already on the machine, and if you really want a GUI, you can download the express edition of the VS IDE for free from their website.

Re:OT

[gbjbaanb]

OK. I am a Windows developer, and have been for ages - Windows suddenly became good with NT4 when everyone I knew and worked for decided to migrate from proprietary unix systems to NT.

I've run every Windows OS since then really.

So, I installed Vista a few months after it became available. It looks nice, I have aero and the sidebar going with a couple of gadgets and I've even grown used to the 'search instead of start menu'.

Things I havn't got used to: the changed Control Panel, it *still* confuses me that 'Add/Remove programs' is now 'Programs and Features' - why do they still do this?! The ones that I use a lot change too - want to change networking... there's 3 dialogs now: Network and Sharing Centre, Network and Device Manager (there doesn't seem to be an easy way to alter settings, start in one, wait for it to 'discover' networks near me (sigh) and then I get to change things).

The same applies to display options - right click on the desktop, you used to choose Properties (or display options) and there you had a dialog to change your settings. Now you only have the 'Personalise' option, with a futher list of options, none of which are intuitive enough to me for what I want to do.

So yes, the 'knobs' have moved .... and been renamed and hidden behind another dialog!

The same applies to Explorer, the 'copy files' minidialog is a nuisance - sometimes it sits there for some time deciding how long it'll take to delete or copy a file, and it occasionally gets it wrong - I have on a couple of times selected a few files in temp, pressed delete and saw it telling me its going to delete everything on my C drive!

I had explorer hang the other day when I renamed a partition label. Annoys me a lot, the amount of time Explorer flakes out on me (its not that often, just enough)

LSASS can go crazy quite often too - why does it need to thrash the disk for half an hour is beyond me. The task scheduler is phenomenally overengineered (as is the new event viewer) taking 5 panes with 2 treeviews to show me the 38 tasks Vista set up. Oh, and when I initially installed Vista the Task Scheduler MMC crashed everytime I tried to edit a task, turns out it had a corrupted system security object (I forget exactly what it was, but this was a fresh install on a clean HDD)

I have turned off UAC and the indexing service so I can't comment on them.

All in all, I don't see anything to make me really want to stay with Vista (though I imagine I'm too lazy to change it again - not unless I go through networking hell like on Thursday), it gives me nothing that XP didn't give me, and XP was a bit less confusing all round. XP also hung less and 'pauses' much less.

Maybe it'll be better with SP1, but I think times are changing. This is the big chance Linux has, as big as it was when the world realised 'we can get NT for £1000 a workstation that performs as well as that AIX box that costs us £10000'.

Re:The bigger problem is Vista running

[Kelz]

I took your advice (a few days ago actually) and tried installing Ubuntu. LiveCD didn't work. Alternate CD installed it but X wouldn't work. Recompiling X wouldn't work. Looked at forums and after 3 hours of trying to figure out what was wrong it appears that my hardware may be too new for Ubuntu.

Ubuntu loads now, but I can't actually log in because it boots me out a second later. I'm no expert, and I've no idea how to fix, and forums are useless. I wanted it to work; I wanted to think it might be ready for the desktop. Its not. At least Vista runs at all.

Re:Maybe 2008 is the year...

[Gadget_Guy]

That means while Open Office will open up your Word 6 document, latest MS Office won't.

Actually, it will. It is Word 2 format (and earlier) that is blocked by default [microsoft.com]. The DOC file format changed dramatically between version 2 and version 6, so it makes sense for to draw the line at that version. The link above shows that you can still open old formats if you want to. I doubt many people still be able to find any documents from that long ago anyway. The Word docs that I still have from back then are from the Unix version of Word, which I presume used the same format at Word for DOS.

As for VBA, reports that they were dropping it from Office were wrong [msdn.com]. They did remove VBA from the Mac version, which I think was a mistake. Sure they should support Applescript, but they should have kept VBA for backwards compatibility.