Slashdot Log In
Microsoft Internal Emails Show Dismay With Vista
Posted by
kdawson
on Thu Feb 28, 2008 01:14 PM
from the you-scratch-my-back dept.
from the you-scratch-my-back dept.
bfwebster writes "Microsoft is currently facing a class-action suit over its designation of allegedly under-powered hardware as being 'Vista Capable.' The discovery process of that lawsuit has now compelled Microsoft to produce some internal emails discussing those issues. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has published extracts of some of those emails, along with a link to a a PDF file containing a more extensive email exchange. The emails reflect a lot of frustration among senior Microsoft personnel about Vista's performance problems and hardware incompatibilities. They also appear to indicate that Microsoft lowered the hardware requirements for 'Vista Capable' in order to include certain lower-end Intel chipsets, apparently as a favor to Intel: 'In the end, we lowered the requirement to help Intel make their quarterly earnings so they could continue to sell motherboards with 915 graphics embedded.' Read the whole PDF; it is informative, interesting, and at times (unintentionally) funny."
Related Stories
[+]
"Vista Capable" Lawsuit Is Now a Class Action 225 comments
An anonymous reader notes an update in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporting that the lawsuit against Microsoft's "Windows Vista Capable" marketing campaign has been granted class-action status. We discussed the company's internal misgivings with this campaign a while back. The suit alleges that "...Microsoft unjustly enriched itself by promoting PCs as 'Windows Vista Capable' even when they could only run a bare-bones version of the operating system, called 'Vista Home Basic.'" In the 2006 pre-holiday season, Microsoft had placed "Windows Vista Capable" stickers on machines to keep the sale of Windows XP machines going after Vista was delayed. Microsoft didn't lose out totally in the recent ruling — the article notes that the judge "narrowed the basis on which plaintiffs could move forward with their claims."
[+]
Technology: NVIDIA's Drivers Caused 28.8% Of Vista Crashes In 2007 344 comments
PaisteUser tips us to an Ars Technica report discussing how 28.8% of Vista's crashes over a period in 2007 were due to faulty NVIDIA drivers. The information comes out of the 158 pages of Microsoft emails that were handed over at the request of a judge in the Vista-capable lawsuit. NVIDIA has already faced a class-action lawsuit over the drivers. From Ars Technica:
"NVIDIA had significant problems when it came time to transition its shiny, new G80 architecture from Windows XP to Windows Vista. The company's first G80-compatible Vista driver ended up being delayed from December to the end of January, and even then was available only as a beta download. In this case, full compatibility and stability did not come quickly, and the Internet is scattered with reports detailing graphics driver issues when using G80 processors for the entirely of 2007. There was always a question, however, of whether or not the problems were really that bad, or if reporting bias was painting a more negative picture of the current situation than what was actually occurring."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
The most damning email: (Score:4, Funny)
To sBallmer:
Steve, Why is it taking forever to send emails?
From sBallmer:
To bGates:
Bill, 640 minutes for roundtrip for email should be enough for everyone.
Best quote... (Score:4, Interesting)
At least... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:At least... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:At least... (Score:5, Insightful)
But until Gates, Balmer, and their entire Board of Directors and upper management staff are gone I see no prospect whatever of them changing their tune. Microsoft is bad news for anybody not directly associated with them, and bad news for many who are. If they actually were drinking their own koolaid I'd be a bit more sympathetic to them.
IMO We would all be better off if Microsoft ceased to exist tomorrow.
Parent
Re:At least... (Score:5, Informative)
Please, please, PLEASE stop spreading the utter trash about the "dos aint done till lotus won't run" as if it is some sort of truth. It is not. Repeating it just makes you appear to be either a troll, or someone who unfortunately believed the misinformation trolls that post this crap on this site.
Please read the first few links on this search result and stop yourself spreading FUD in the future [google.co.za]
And please, spare me the comments about being a M$$$ $hill. I have no affiliation with microsoft, I just really hate it when people spread misinformation on this site, which then gets repeated infinitely as if it were truth. The less FUD coming from, and aimed at microsoft, the better.
Parent
Re:At least... (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in the day, those of us who were using various Business Basics to write custom code relied heavily on a thick reference book called Undocumented DOS, which described the hidden interface to DOS internals that were being used by Microsoft applications, but were not supposed to be used by third party developers because, well, because they weren't officially documented. They were, however, generally faster or in some other way better than the documented routines. The feeling was that if Word and Excel used these, they had to be pretty damn stable.
Microsoft continued this practice with the Windows 3.x APIs. I was doing other things by the end of that era, so I have no personal knowledge of anything after Windows For Workgroups.
While
Parent
Re:At least... (Score:5, Insightful)
With the waste of time down, and mindshare up, Linux and similar systems in its space will rise to great heights and Microsoft will have to actually make good products to remain relevant. That means we get multiple great operating systems rather than the prolonged battle between highly compromising systems we have now.
Parent
Ballmer's first response (Score:5, Funny)
Is it just me? (Score:5, Interesting)
I read the title as "Disney", not "Dismay".
A pity, truely (Score:5, Insightful)
What saddens me is that I want to like Vista, but I can't. My sister loves it, but to get to run it she has now 8x the PC that I do (Athlon64 x2 vs my ancient Socket-A Sempron), and I still crunch her into the ground for performance in many cases. Microsoft has managed to become the victim of it's own success, I believe. They worked on the premise that hardware would progress faster than it did, but people have hit the point of "good enough." More and more I don't see people upgrading their PC's. I used to pick up used machines easily that were just 2-3 years old. Now, this Sempron 2800 is the last one I got this way, and I've had it for years. People just aren't upgrading. Bodes poorly for Vista.
Re:A pity, truely (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Can AMD use this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Shows how Microsoft lost its way (Score:5, Insightful)
To summarize, they just don't care about the customer. At no point do the emails indicate them making any decisions based on what's best for their customers. It makes it pretty obvious why Vista has been such a failure so far. They can't even get the service pack right.
I'm not big on the idea of predicting corporate downfalls but you really have to wonder whether a company that makes such incredibly bad decisions is long for this world.
Re:Shows how Microsoft lost its way (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Mike Nash (Score:5, Informative)
Performance. thats it (Score:5, Insightful)
and dont feed me the 'but those are games' bullshit. for, games and entertainment comprise almost half of the activity on computers, and even for business, only idiots would want to put vista on a client/standalone computer in the office, having the need to pour a few hundred bucks just for being able to run vista so that the computer is going to conduct the same work it did with xp.
on gaming front microsoft tried to push vista with the 'high performance' bullcrap to gamers with dx10. correcting - they FORCED it, and almost noone took it. now they have to oblige with nvidia's needs for putting dx10 capability for xp, because people are just evading not only vista, but high end graphics cards too, because they need dx10 to deliver the latest, but noone wants to take the vista sh@t just because of it.
sorry people. you in microsoft have utterly failed with vista, and you need to go back to drawing board, even, put on your thinking caps and reevaluate your approach to customer and their needs.
we are not the witless herd of the 90s anymore.
Microsoft's REAL error (Score:5, Interesting)
Quite revealing... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Quite revealing... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Quite revealing... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Punctuation is a sign of weakness and indecisio (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
One big reason why few want Vista... (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft got cheap. Instead of paying reluctant vendors to write Vista drivers for older hardware (supposedly this happened for Win95), they ended up turning Vista into a bitter pill. Case in point, I have an HP Photosmart 7350 printer that I bought in 2002. This printer is great because it was one of the last printers to not have HP's customer-friendly "your printer cartridge is too old so I won't print" mechanism. For a few months after Vista's release, HP kept saying that the printer was incompatible with Vista. Suddenly, the printer is compatible with the "HP Deskjet 5550" driver included with Vista. Huh? Of course, HP says that some features are unavailable, but doesn't say which ones...
Even Vista fanbois have to agree that hardware incompatibility/driver issues are the biggest problem with Vista. Microsoft's Vista Upgrade adviser, while offering great disclosure, doesn't help promote Vista. So that leaves people like me stuck between having perfectly useful hardware with no fully-functioning Vista driver (or no driver at all), and moving to Vista... So I'm sticking with XP.
MS bit by its own lock-in (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft is being bit by its own successful campaign of getting hardware manufactures to only support Windows with "Designed for Windows" hardware. These WinDevices (WinModems, WinPrinters, WinScanners, etc.) rely on Windows to do the bulk of their processing and if you change the way Windows interfaces with these devices (as is the case with Vista) you need to create brand new drivers from scratch. The problem is that hardware manufactures are not going to invest the time and money to make a discontinued piece of hardware work with Vista when they can sell you a shiny new one.
If Microsoft would have promoted "real" hardware that did not need specialized driver software which is intimately entangled in the internals of Windows, they would not be in this position. Take, for example, a standard Postscript printer: complicated low-level drivers are unnecessary in most operating systems and it just works (to steal a line from the Mac world).
Could you imagine a world where every multi-function device used standard USB communication to interface to the Postscript/PCL printer, SANE/TWAIN scanner, and the built-in fax modem was a standard serial device that used AT command sequences? If Microsoft promoted such standards, this device could not only "just work" with Vista, but also Mac OS (X or otherwise) Linux, OS/2, BeOS... basically everything. The conspiracy theory part of my brain says that MS just can't stand for that, which is why it did not "discourage" hardware manufactures from tying basic functionality to Windows.
But now that it needs to change the internals of Windows, Microsoft's hardware lock-in is coming home to roost.
(BTW, does anyone else think it is monumentally stupid that Vista does not support generic Postscript or PCL printers out of the box and must rely on HP or Adobe for such drivers?)
Parent
I can see why Jim Allchin retired. (Score:5, Interesting)
"We really botched this."
You tie that together with his memo from 2004:
"I am not sure how the company lost sight of what matters to our customers (both business and home) the most, but in my view we lost our way. I think our teams lost sight of what bug-free means, what resilience means, what full scenarios mean, what security means, what performance means, how important current applications are, and really understanding what the most important problems [our] customers face are. I see lots of random features and some great vision, but that doesn't translate into great products.
I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft.
Anybody know if he's since switched to using a Mac?
The Evil Empire Shows Its colors (Score:5, Insightful)
Vista: The Most Linux-like Version of Windows Yet (Score:5, Insightful)
Emails (pdf) Summary (Score:5, Informative)
Early 2006: Microsoft got cozy with HP to make sure that HP invested in a better graphical experience for Vista. Intel had to make its quarterly earnings and convinced Microsoft to call their chipset "capable" even though it couldn't meat the graphic standards. Microsoft had explicitly told HP that they wouldn't do this, but they, led by some dude named Will Poole, decided to bone HP to make Intel (specifically some SVP chick named Renee-most likely Renee James) happy. Then MS discussed how they are going to try to play it off to intel with some fancy obfuscating letter. They got this guy at MS named Jim Allchin to sign off on it, which he reluctantly did, but chastised them for pulling this crap. Some dude named Mike Ybarra pointed out to Jim that they are boning HP and their customers just to get cuddly wuddly with Intel and Jim seemed to agree, but figured the wheels were in motion and could not be stopped. Mike specifically said, "We are caving to Intel... We are really burning HP... We are allowing Intel to drive our consumer experience..."
Fast forward a year later and some board member John Shirley sends some borderline literate guy named Steve Balmer an email about how his shit won't work with Vista and that some of the stuff may never get Vista drivers. They surmise that vendors didn't trust them to deliver Vista (gee, wonder why) so they didn't make drivers. Balmer sends an email to some guy named Steven Sinofsky asking about the driver situation. Sinofsky agrees that vendors didn't expect them to ship and also says that changes to Vista made it so XP drivers wouldn't work, he questions how smart it was to call the Intel chipset "capable" when it wasn't, and says that they need to be clearer with the industry. Then some exec named Mike Nash points out how his company boned him because he bought a $2100 "Vista capable" laptop that is only good as an email machine.
In the end, some exec John Kalman says that lowering their standard for Intel screwed them and they won't make such a stupid mistake with Windows 7.
In short, Will Poole is a weasel who is just trying to make some Intel chick happy. Mike Ybarra is too thoughtful and has too much foresight to work at MS. Jim Allchin needs to go with his gut and remind Will Poole which side of the desk he sits on. Steve Ballmer is missing some keys on his keyboard. Steven Sinofsky and Kohn Kalman have 20/20 hindsight. HP deserves to kick somebody's ass at MS. They should probably kick Intel's ass too, but MS is too busy licking it.
Re:Shocked (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not about making a decision based on profit, it is about a decision to deceive and lie to make a profit. Big difference.
Parent
Re:For more information (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone decided that was a valid, acceptable configuration for a Windows Vista machine.
Parent
Re:For more information (Score:5, Informative)
Nearly all OEMs still allow you to upgrade to XP, but you have to ask. They won't tell you about it, you have to be active about it. But then, those that make active decisions about hardware and systems rarely end up with Windows, let alone MS Vista. Lots of people are getting burned by leaving too much of the decision up to the sales staff.
But even if you can't upgrade to XP, unless she's playing heavily some games that don't run in WINE or surfing a lot of WMV porn, then she'll get more mileage out of a linux distro like CentOS [centos.org] and Kubuntu [kubuntu.org]. Try it. If they suck, then you can crow about it. If they save you time and effort, then it was time well spent and you can go around to any MS Vista users and rub their noses in it. Nowadays even Photoshop runs in WINE.
If it's for school only, then the 13" macbook is perfect for the backpack and can run your choice of Linux or OS X or both, plus a number of legacy applications from Windows.
Parent
Re:For more information (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:For more information (Score:5, Funny)
No, that would be "flies like a chair". Which is wrong. Flies like a banana. Chimps like a chair.
Parent
Re:For more information (Score:5, Informative)
There are four radio buttons:
- Let Windows choose what's best for my computer (default)
- Adjust for best appearance
- Adjust for best performance
- Custom
The first radio button is selected by default, and at least on my system, is the same as "Adjust for best appearance", which is what I would expect to be selected by default. This might be different on lower powered machines.
The "Custom" option lets you enable and disable about two dozen fine grained options such as "Slide taskbar buttons", or "Smooth edges of screen fonts".
Parent
Re:For more information (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:For more information (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
It's time, boys and girls, for (Score:5, Interesting)
(1) You point out that "novice users" (and that would be the vast majority of computer users), are not going to run Photoshop. Yet you mention that 512MB ain't enough to run it. Why did you even mention it then?
(2) You say "or you like to play mp3s while working", implying that this would overload a 512MB XP machine. I have mplayer.exe running with a movie paused -- 17MB of RAM used. 17MB more is going to break the XP camel's back?
(3) "or a number of other situation". You mean like running AutoCAD, a continuous system benchmark, and playing WoW...while downloading pr0n? Man, I see novices doing that all the time.
(4) "but I will be [sic] that they *will* have a large number of applications open at once". Well, in my experience novices tend to have a grand total of one program open at once, and if you try to leave a second one open they will close it, sometimes even when you have carefully minimized it. Many developers are this way as well -- wanting to squeeze an extra 50msec out of that recompile. Oh, and that one program is almost for sure 99% most likely you-can-bet maximized.
Real world situation #1: upgrading the dreaded mother-in-law computer to XP involving a machine with 64MB of RAM. Yup, one-eighth of what you are whining about. EVERYTHING I re-installed worked. MS O2k, CompuServe 2000, graphics editors, alternate browser, etc. Yes, everything ran slowly. Yes, it was slow to boot up (but not as slow as 512MB Vista machines). And when told how cheap RAM was, the m-i-l rushed out and bought 256MB.
Real world situation #2: my wife upgrading her computer while I was away. It went from 98 to XP Pro, with 320MB of RAM. The thing ran hundreds of games and everything else. Nobody ever thought it was slow. I used it myself for some things for a time. It was only replaced a year ago, and died of dust overload, if anything.
Somewhere a chair-thrower is rubbing his hands together and saying "Vista is right on target! [slashdot.org]"
Parent
Re:It's time, boys and girls, for (Score:5, Funny)
You had me until then. Well played, sir!
Parent
Re:Shitty Lawsuit, Bad Priorities (Score:5, Insightful)
I love the new Vistas look and feel but unfortunately it just doesn't perform the way it was promised and they did rush it to market. I think that any company that rusahes a product to market and the consumer ends up paying for it, should be punished for such negligence. If this were a car manufacturer or a drug manufacturer, you would see the same thing. So why should Microsoft be any different?
Parent
Re:Shitty Lawsuit, Bad Priorities (Score:5, Funny)
You fiend! How much are you extorting them for removal?
Come to think of it that would be a nice racket...
Parent
Re:Shitty Lawsuit, Bad Priorities (Score:5, Interesting)
If you read the emails, they allowed labeling that had Designed for Windows Vista Basic Logo, Designed for Windows Vista Premium Logo, and then then a Vista Capable logo. Microsoft thought the requirements for the Vista Capable logo is that users "will have a good experience, at least equivalent to Windows XP, when upgraded to Windows Vista."
I think Microsoft will lose on 2 fronts - their technical requirements apparently are having machines that run Windows Vista to perform worst then Windows XP when they indicate their Vista Capable logo should be equivalent. Second, since they were the ones telling the OEMs what the labels were and the requirements for them, then they needed to communicate this to the end user by having a sanctioned straight forward information sheet available at each sales point.
What surprises me most about the emails is how they apparently caved in to Intel when they were aware that they were sacrificing the "Vista Experience" for their future buyers. It is no wonder only 1/3rd or so Window Vista License holders are actually running windows Vista (estimate based on combining netapplications market share for Mac OS X and Windows Vista combined with Steve Job's statement of total Mac OS X installed base and Bill Gates statement of 100,000,000 licenses sold.)
Parent
Re:I don't get what the problems are (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:I don't get what the problems are (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Vista on minimal HW (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
no Aero on minimal HW (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Vista on minimal HW (Score:5, Funny)
Official Microsoft advice: please refrain from playing graphics games on Vista. You may still, however, play text adventures. Honk if you love Zork.
Windows Vista: Designed For Infocom.
Parent
Re:Vista on minimal HW (Score:5, Interesting)
However if you consider a 3GHz CPU with 1 GB RAM to be "an old box", then you have some serious perception problems
At the same time I have Vista Home Premium (dual booting with Debian) on a relatively powerful quad-core PC with 3GB RAM, 512MB NVIDIA 8XXX card, SATA, etc (the works), and while it is not slow, it is not snappy either ! I expect most things to be instantaneous on such hardware and they aren't. Sometimes I get the the waiting cursor even for trivial tasks like opening the control panel, with no other apps running ! (well, except Steam, the anti-virus and the other craplets that come with a pre-installed PC
Parent
Re:Vista on minimal HW (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Vista on minimal HW (Score:5, Insightful)
However, I assumed you meant what you said quoted up there, the main reason to upgrade from XP to Vista was security. Or at least by 'earlier OS's' you meant earlier versions of Windows.
And sure, valid point that would be!
But
First off, so mods wont get 'facts' confused with 'troll', i need to post this url at the top:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/MS08-001.mspx [microsoft.com]
This will be explained nearly towards the bottom of this post alot better, however is proof your statement is false in a black&white binary world. If you are interested in real world facts where it isnt so clear cut, read on...
An OS that ships with zero services facing the internet (or LAN for that matter, since there is little difference outside of Windows World) is about 100% secure. No version of windows since 3.11 (IE any one with a tcp stack built in) has passed here, and still does.
'But then you add services' you say. Sure, ok. Failure again!
First, we should make the distinction between vender apps and 3rd party apps acting as services. We do this cuz it wouldnt be fair to blame MS for Joe Blows 'super secure internet cursors package' that connects to a remote server plaintext with no auth and executes a list of commands in a file.
Technically all linux services are 3rd party. However, lets bend the rule in windows favor here, and count the 'main' services included in almost all linux distros as not-3rd party (despite the fact they are), such as openssh, apache, bind, etc.
More linux services out of the box have been secure than windows ones, and for the linux ones that have had problems, they have been announced and patched/fixed generally in the time span one sleeps or goes to work in. Windows security bugs are usually swept under the rug and hidden from public view for at least a week, more commonly a month, and in a few rare extreams for years. (See below for proof)
So thats 16-24 HOURS to a fix for opensource apps, and whenever next tuesday rolls around for Windows (IE up to 7 days if the hole is major sever and reported minutes or an hour after patch tuesday just hit.)
Now lets hit the OSX part. You are more correct there, but still not really.
OSX out of the box is by defiinition FAR more secure than vista. Open OSX services: 0, Open vista services: >1
What that means is vista has potential holes that are out there, and wont be reported to us for months (standard MS track record) and wont be fixed till next tuesday (1-7 days), and there is a non 0% chance that disabling that windows services is not possible (no matter how small), which is not the case in OSX.
So, that leaves OSX local exploits compared to vista, and 3rd party introduced ones. In that area I dont know. So i'll give you that just cuz I also dont care to know. easy points, and perfectly plausible to be true.
Apple has had its cases of delaying fixes and trying to hide security issues that don't fall in their opensource components.
Hell, up till very recently (~1-2 months ago) there was a flaw in ALL windows TCP stacks that lets an attacker simply execute code (Ok, in fairness, except for windows 2k, which it just crashed instead of ran code) which included vista.
This bug has existed for many many years and just recently reported and fixed.
you think the 0day hacking groups havent known about this for many years? no, they do, and use it.
Vista was out of the box vulnerable to having remote code executed simply by being on a network.
BTW, here it is from MS's own knowledge base
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/MS08-001.mspx [microsoft.com]
Parent
Re:Vista on minimal HW (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with Vista is that to increase security, the OS had to restrict the ability to so easily add software that malware also was easy to install. This meant going to the Unix model of separating administrator accounts from user accounts by default. This caused problems in many device drivers which had not been properly written to use user level privileges by default. Many device manufactures really don't have smarts to write secure drivers, especially those who are trying to sell in the cost conscious consumer market.
Parent