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."

"Vista-ready" is not binary

[G4from128k]

Although I'm not a MSFT fanboi, I can see how defining compatibility is not easy. Although a given OS certainly will not run on ancient hardware or hardware lacking key features, the required MB of RAM, GB of disk, and GHz of CPU are all subjective requirements once the hardware is above some minimum spec. I know that I've run OSes on hardware that were below the recommended spec and found them quite usable (for my purposes). Add the fact that the company must set the required hardware spec before finishing the OS and its no wonder that MSFT picked a spec that some find unbearable.

I'm not surprised by the internal squabbles or that the company would pick a spec that's lower than what some engineers argued for.

The best part, IMHO...

[Anonymous Coward]

...is the discussion over the miserable driver situation. They eventually conclude that IHVs didn't expect them to ever ship Vista, and that the IHVs also didn't trust Microsoft enough to work hard at getting their drivers working on the Vista betas because they expected subsequent changes to Vista that would break the drivers and negate all the effort.

These guys honestly seem perplexed that the IHVs don't trust Microsoft. I find that utterly hilarious.

train crash in slow motion

[arabagast]

Been reading the pdf the past days, and altough it seems as if there was many sensible voices over at microsoft, they had to much of a momentum forward, making it hard to change directions midcourse. it's really a pain reading those letters knowing what vista ended up at. I'm just hoping to find a reference like "this is ME all over again" somewhere in those letters, would have been so nice to hear that from the horses mouth :)

and btw: it's 158 pages, not 185.

Re:Maybe 2008 is the year...

[SpinyNorman]

Office is certainly a cash cow, but the the document format lock-in that keeps it so is disappearing. Things like OpenOffice have pretty good interopability and Microsoft seem to be getting increasingly forced to open up their standards.

Don't forget that Google is also sticking it to them on this front. For 95% of home users Google Docs (supports MS .doc, .ppt, .xls formats) is all you need. I guess it's karma from killing Netscape that is coming back to Microsoft.

http://docs.google.com/ [google.com]

Microsoft could have done plenty...

[argent]

Microsoft is always in something of a no-win position when it comes to minimum system requirements. If it specifies huge hardware needs, then the opportunity to sell upgrades is reduced since most existing PCs can't handle the new version. If it sets a minimal baseline platform, then it's difficult (though arguably not impossible) to add any features that make upgrading worth the hassle and risk.

It would have been easy to add features to make Vista worth buying: make it modular, make it simpler, make it more rather than less reliable, and make the features that reduce Windows security optional, and look at what your best competitors were doing.

* Make the HTML control optional, rewrite the control panel applets and other shell components that need it to work without it, and change the tight binding between rendering and access control. Provide a "legacy" wrapper for it so that old programs can use the insecure API, but make THAT optional as well.

* 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.

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

* 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.

* 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.

These might not sell to home users, but it would sell to business, and don't forget that what got Windows into the home for a lot of people was the fact that they were using it at the office.

But this would all be diametrically opposed to Microsoft's "we know better than you what you want, and that's *our* OS, not yours" policies. Hell, even Apple gave up on the idea of unbundling access to UNIX from Rhapsody, and if it's not too scary for APPLE users it's not too scary for Windows.

Wow, Wall*Mart

[xtracto]

When even Wall*Mart tells you to do what is best for customers...

a Microsoft employee, wrote that Wal-Mart is "extremely disappointed in the fact that the standards were lowered and feel like customer confusion will ensue. They would like to see Microsoft reconsider the program and allow for the use of 2 different logos; one that is strictly a Windows Vista Home Basic Capable, and the other Windows Vista Capable."

She continued, "Please give this some consideration; it would be a lot less costly to do the right thing for the customer than to spend dollars on the back end trying to fix the problem."

That snippet was really insightful. Shit, Microsoft *should* have made those two stickers (Vista Home Capable and Vista Others). When they announced that there would be 6 different versions of Vista everybody *knew* it would bring problems...

HP is enraged, Walmart upset

[goombah99]

My favorite part [informationweek.com] of the e-mails was where they show how they massively screwed HP and ignored Walmart. I suspect they will wind up paying for this one way or another in vendor credibility.

This retreat took at least one OEM, Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HP), by complete surprise, as this late-January 2006 e-mail showed:

In our August 7x7 with HP you both [Jim Allchin, Co-President Platforms & Services at the time, and Senior VP Will Poole] committed to HP that we would not move off the WDDM requirement and HP made significant product road map changes to support graphics for the full Vista experience. Ramano [John Romano, Senior VP of HP's Consumer PC Group] specifically told Jim that HP will invest in graphics if MS would give him 100% assurance that we would not budge for Intel. This goes beyond desktop for HP as their mobile guys moved off 915 early for the same reasons.

it doesn't just work

The problem with the "Capable" program is that the customer who buys a "Capable" machine and Vista retail does not know that "Vista Capable" != everything just works. The bar for getting such a sticker was/is too low or the marketing around the sticker was/is not specific enough as to what it actually means; Vista installs, runs but there is no actual submissions of systems going through any sort of "Vista Capable" experience validation (as opposed to what happens in the actual DFW [Designed for Windows] Logo program).

Microsoft's current predicament might be best summarized by this e-mail describing a February 2006 meeting:

Wal-Mart was very vocal today regarding the Windows Vista Capable messaging. They are extremely disappointed in the fact that standards were lowered and feel like customer confusion will ensue. ... They also went so far as to say they wish Windows Home Basic was not even in the SKU lineup. ... Please give this some consideration; it would be a lot less costly to do the right thing for the customer now than to spend dollars on the back end trying to fix the problem.

Re:Sinofsky really worries me

[gbjbaanb]

And why wouldn't he? The laptop carried the "Vista Capable" sticker, so you'd think it was capable of running Vista, and every piece of hardware comes with drivers for Windows, that's just a given.

Of course, with what we know now, he should have asked around first "Hey guys, does Vista Capable mean it can run Vista? Can I get drivers for a popular piece of commodity hardware?".

I'm sure he believed the hype from MS on this worryingly dodgy OS.

(disclaimer: I have a MSDN copy of Vista Ultimate, and even I'm thinking of going back to XP.)

Re:The bigger problem is Vista running

[zakezuke]

"Even the cancel/allow is perfectly fine for most cases"

And somehow Sunbelt Kerio Personal (formally Tiny Firewall) were somehow able to implement similar features, yet Microsoft couldn't get it right.

Come to think about it, Microsoft has always had a blind spot for some simple concepts. Yes, No, No to all, Yes to all. Which ever option I needed they always neglected to put in the menu.

Do Gamers Have an Option?

[Death_Aparatus]

Unfortunately for me, I am a gamer. Serious PC gaming is still pretty much stuck on the windows platform. They tried pushing us to Vista with DX10 and when they EoL XP, they will have succeeded. I, for one, will be taking a closer look at Wine on my Ubuntu partition. I just hope it really works as described. Does any one know of any other linux gaming solutions? I suppose I do still have an itch for nethack every once in a while.

Vista is slower than XP even when XP is *Virtual*!

[JimMarch(equalccw)]

It's even funnier than stated.

A year ago a friend and I bought near-identical low-end laptops: Celeron single-core 1.6 CPUs, Intel 945 graphics, etc - one Acer (mine) and one Toshiba. These were $400 Best-Buy-sale-o-the-week critters. Both shipped originally with Vista Home Basic. We set them up with 1gig memory each (533) - they had shipped with 512 and Vista was utterly unusable.

At 1gig we tested both with MS-Office 2003. He still had Vista. I had Ubuntu Feisty 7.04, Innotek Virtualbox 1.52 I believe it was, and Windows XP running as a virtual machine with 512megs of it's own RAM leaving 512 for Ubuntu.

The Ubuntu/XP mutant combo spanked the Vista box - severely - in everything but boot time as my rig had to boot two OSes in succession.

At that time getting Office '03 to work in Wine was a no-go. It's at least possible now I've heard, and that might be even faster. But regardless, Vista with one gig should have been able to keep up with virtualized XP running in 512...it wasn't even close.

Need I mention that I rapidly converted my bud to Ubuntu/XP?

Re:Microsoft could have done plenty...

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of the control panel applets in Vista were rewritten. Most are property page dialogs anyway, which is MFC, not HTML. Are you refering to the help system? That is HTML, but it's designed to merge from both local and online help sources. Perhaps they'll flip that to XPS instead, although people would continue to bitch about that.

Interix is available as a download for all versions of Vista, and XP, and 2003, and 2008. It's just that Vista Ultimate has Interix as a Windows feature, so you don't need to download it separately. Who cares?

Also, as of Windows 2003 and XP SP2, all versions of Windows ship with compilers for the .NET languages (and maybe C++, I don't recall). Anyway, these are also free downloads, so what's the issue?

The funny thing is that you decry Microsoft for bundling a myriad of options that you don't prefer, and then you decry Microsoft for not bundling the specific features that you would prefer. Microsoft bundles for the market, so to expect something like a POSIX subsystem or a compiler is just stupid. It's a download away, and you are more capable of downloading and installing something technical than another user would be to download and enable DRM support to watch their BluRay disks.

Re:The problem with Vista is that people don't car

[Monoliath]

There was talk of some magical OS Microsoft was going to release back in 2003, named XP Reloaded.

Yeah, it was released, it's called Windows Server 2003. It is everything Windows XP should have been...games run great, audio / graphic production works great and seems to 'never' crash.

Intel 910? It's a MS incompetent devs

[Wolfier]

Intel 910 works mighty fine on Compiz-Fusion with almost all eye candies enabled.

If Aero cannot work well on Intel 910, it's probably because Aero is an incompetent pile of junk compared to Compiz.

Re:If you think 158 pages is a bit much..

[gormanly]

Yes. The people who believed the sticker were really uninformed, that's why the lawsuit could succeed. They looked at the info provided by MS and thought they were informed, that their new PC they were buying would be able to run Vista when it was released

Many people - including Mike Nash, Microsoft's Corporate Vice President, Windows Product Management - thought that were well informed in advance of purchase by the sticker on their machine that said "Vista Capable", then they tried to run Vista and it sucked. They trusted Microsoft to set reasonable minimum requirements and got screwed.

Of course, Microsoft's minima have always been over-optimistic at best, and all techies know that just because they tell you XP Pro requires a 233MHz Pentium MMX and 64MB of RAM, or Server 2003 Enterprise Edition requires a 133MHz CPU and 128MB of RAM, it doesn't make it a good idea to try it. Joe Average shouldn't need to consult his resident geek about whether the sticker is lying

Someone senior at MS should take the rap for this. If you're going to sign off on a set of minimum requirements for any software why would you not make sure to spend at least a week using it on a box with that spec? If it runs like a dog, bump upwards. No excuses, Mr Allchin...

Re:Allchin?

[rtb61]

Talking about responsibility, how about M$'s responsibility to it's share holders. What about all that advertising, press releases and even SEC rtaements upon which investors based their investment decisions. The Operating system is meant to be M$'s flagship product, it's main source of profits and revenue.

These emails paint a wildly different picture of the future financial viability of Vista and the revenue it was meant to generate versus M$'s public disclosures. A clear case of fraudulent misrepresentation of the qualities of the main product in order to inflate M$'s share price and in turn Ballmer's and Gates personal wealth. How many other M$ executives profited by this deceit, selling shares based upon insider information about the poor qualities of the main M$ product and it's likely impact upon future revenues which is already evidenced by heavy discounting.

So will the SEC sit on it's hands or will it start to consider that mass media advertising, press releases, and web site advertising that is designed to mislead customers is also intended to mislead investors.