Microsoft emails: Vista not so capable after all….
dan tynan on Feb 29 2008 at 2:17 pm | Filed under: Cringley, Microsoft
When it says fibby fibby fibby on the label label label
(This originally appeared in Infoworld’s Notes From the Field blog.)
At first, I thought the whole lawsuit over bogus “Vista capable” labeling didn’t have legs. Sure, those labels were, shall we say, ‘aspirational’? But anyone who’s ever looked at the minimum requirements for Windows over the years knows better than to believe anything Microsoft says. Yet this suit has already produced a treasure trove of Cringe-worthy evidence -– including 150 pages of emails detailing how even Microsoft’s executives themselves knew what a dog Vista was and were royally PO’d over it.
I’m having a hard time picking my favorite quotes from all the goodies:
“I cannot understand with a product this long in creation why there is such a shortage of drivers. I suppose the vendors did not trust us enough to use the beta for driver testing?” (Jon Shirley)
“No [vendors] believed we would ever really ship so they didn’t start work until late 2006…” (Steven Sinofsky)
“We are caving to Intel…. We are allowing Intel to drive our customer experience.” (Mike Ybarra)
“In the end, we lowered the requirement to help Intel make their quarterly earnings so they could continue to sell motherboards with the 915 graphics embedded.” (John Kalkman)
“I personally got burned by the Intel 915 issue on a laptop that I PERSONALLY (eg with my own $$$)….I now have a $2100 email machine.” (Mike Nash)
“We really botched this…. you guys have to do a better job with our customers than what was shown here.” (Jim Allchin)
It reads like a Greek tragedy. Lack of drivers, hardware incompatibilites, false requirements, and bending over forwards to please Intel – yep, that’s Microsoft in a nutshell. Will somebody please shoot this company and put us all out of our misery?
