More dirt in 'Vista Capable' lawsuit
You know an e-mail is going to be juicy when its subject line is "CONFIDENTIAL" and it starts out: "I would prefer not to have this discussion on email."
That's how Intel's Renee James started an e-mail to Microsoft's Will Poole, discussing the company's concerns over Microsoft's "Vista Capable" program. Intel was particularly upset over Microsoft's plan to require Vista Capable machines to have graphics cards that would support Vista's new driver model, as its 915 chipset was not planned to have that support.
Microsoft eventually did drop that requirement, a shift that is now the subject of a class action lawsuit. The plaintiffs in that case charge that, by caving to Intel, Microsoft allowed sub-optimal Vista machines to be sold with the Vista Capable sticker.
The exchange between James and Poole is just one of many new e-mails detailed in the latest court filings, which were noted Thursday by Seattle-area tech site TechFlash.
TechFlash has the full court filing up on its Web site, so if it's a slow Friday, by all means give the article and the documents a read. If you don't have time, here are some of the juiciest bits:
• Intel CEO Paul Otellini called Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer personally to air his complaints about the program, which initially didn't call for machines running Intel's 915 chipset to qualify for the Vista Capable sticker.
• While Sony was pleased Microsoft decided to allow the 915-based systems to qualify even though they lacked a Vista graphics driver, Dell was confused, given that such systems wouldn't qualify for a Vista logo once Vista started shipping. HP meanwhile, was peeved, because it had invested in pricier graphics chips to support Vista's WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model) graphics requirement.
• Jim Allchin was described variously as "beyond being upset" and "apoplectic" over the decision, while other Microsoft workers described it as bad for customers.
In an e-mail--one that I'm sure is a favorite of the plaintiffs' lawyers--Allchin says "I believe we are going to be misleading customers with the Capable program."
Computer makers "will say a machine is Capable and customers will believe that it will run all the core Vista features," Allchin wrote. "The fact that aero (Vista's new graphics theme) won't be there EVER for many of these machines is misleading to customers."
During her years at CNET News, Ina Fried has changed beats several times, changed genders once, and covered both of the Pirates of Silicon Valley. These days, most of her attention is focused on Microsoft. E-mail Ina. 
Top ppl at companies like Dell and several smallers oems in Taiwan know exactly how that goes...
I can say for certain that the allegations you're making ("deceptive" and "bullying") are way off-base. The customers that my colleagues and I dealt with when I was there were our masters... anything they wanted, we dropped everything and got for them.
That said, I'm thinking this stemmed from arguments between techs at Intel and Microsoft, with each claiming the other, and by the time it filtered upstairs, it got blown out of proportion. For the record, I have a laptop with an Intel GMA on it, and while I had to strip Aero down (a LOT), it does run on it. Funny thing is, Compiz and even OSX (via OSXX86 patching) run their full-on 3D effects just fine... on the exact same hardware.
All that said, Microsoft still had the option of saying "no". It wasn't as if Intel would have suddenly stopped making x86 processors capable of running Windows. Intel is just a vendor in this case. The decision was on Microsoft, and they decided to screw over the customer, pure and simple.
Microsoft caved not because of any bullying on Intel's part, but because they knew that Aero (and Vista in general) ran like crap on equipment that Microsoft's competition ran just fine on, and that equipment was pretty much a standard. MS Vista simply did not want to appear to be what it really was: a resource-hog.
Therein lies the deception... but not on Intel's part.
/P
OTOH, they're not half-bad... I'm using one right now (business-class laptop).
The "source" can be both: the OEM initially (w/ MSFT paying them for the bandwidth), and one at Microsoft as backup.
OEM's have drivers and 3rd-party software for both XP and Vista on a given model (Dell and HP certainly do)... those can be had there.
I used to sell computers for a while and people like you got really annoying because they pretended every version of Vista offered downgrade rights when in fact that isn't true. Only Vista Business and Ultimate have downgrade rights to XP Pro. I used to get all sorts of idiots who thought somehow that they had the right to use XP with their machine with Vista Home Premium because someone like yourself told them that they had rights to downgrade any version of Vista. If not for people like you spreading inaccuracies I would never have had to deal with explaining people how they had been misled by their supposedly "saavy" friends.
Source:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/f/4/5f4c83d3-833e-4f11-8cbd-699b0c164182/royaltyoemreferencesheet.pdf
If you don't know what the heck you are talking about could you please not spread inaccurate information.
The initial crime itself is bad enough.
But I guess you can be criminal and incompetent if you've got the market locked up forever and a day through the bootloader exclusivity clauses with the manufacturers.
Shame that CNET doesn't write about that one or twice a day, or whatever it will take to get the regulators interested.
I'll say it one last time. If MS and Intel wanted to sell an operating system for those computers then they should have built an operating system for those computers. Instead they built a bigger OS and didn't want to deal with the consequences of that decision. They're acting like teenagers.
Even today the requirements they give for Vista are the same and still too low. By hiding the truth about how big it is they're telling me they are ashamed of Vista. Yes, there are some things I like about Vista, but how can I get behind Vista when the very people that sell it are ashamed of it? How can anyone else? Now, maybe MS will learn their lesson with Windows 7 and program it so it runs on the hardware we actually have, but I doubt it. Intel will probably want to get some other crap piece of hardware off their backs and MS will cave again.
They just didn't want to tell the truth because then their new OS would look bad. Like when Intel thought it looked bad said oh no! How are we going to sell our crap video chips with your friggin bloated OS Microsoft!
Microsoft had a few choices at that point. They could of said A. You're not going to be selling those graphic chips with Vista. Intel and MS might have taken a loss on the low end computers because of that decision, but at least they would have been honest about it.
B. MS could have fixed Vista so it does work on those machines and reaped the reward of some hard work. After all, almost all of the complaints about Vista that people still make today with SP1 were made by beta testers before it even got released. It isn't like they didn't know. They just didn't want to listen.
Then they had choice C. They could just lie about it and hide the experience index and the real system requirements from consumers until they got their computer home. By the time you get the crapbook home it's too late for you sucker! Good luck finding a Windows XP disk sucker! Now we have the proof right here that they picked option C.
Remember, the first Macintosh had 128 kilobytes of RAM and a 4 MHz processor!
Alright, the general idea of your post was right. However, in this particular situation it's a bit more complicated than that. First, Aero does use 3D effects. The slower the integrated chip the slower the GUI will draw.
Also, before Aero draws a window to the screen it waits until the entire window has been drawn. Then it saves a bitmap of that image that it can composite onto the desktop over and over again until the window needs updated. This makes the graphics feel smoother and faster. This isn't like Windows XP. With XP it's like watching a painter paint the entire window every time you look at it. This makes the system feel sluggish.
Now, why is this important? On Windows XP the drawing API, GDI is hardware accelerated to fix the sluggish feeling. They just made the painter go real fast. However, on Vista this wasn't needed anymore. So they took out the hardware acceleration for GDI. That's why turning off Aero won't help. However, since some of these chips didn't support Aero some users got the worst of both, no composition and no acceleration
However, this is the main problem. The main difference between a dedicated graphics card and an integrated graphics chip is the card has its own ram. An integrated graphics chip doesn't. It locks out some of the ram on your motherboard and uses it as video ram. This means your ram is going to get full even quicker and your computer is going to swap to disk more often. That is how an integrated chip causes the computer to slow down. You simply have less ram available to you.
/P
lol, I wonder how many people actually got that one
My next computer will be WINDOWS XP
(I need to run Morrowind and associated programlets and mods)
Microsofts worst competion is ITSELF.
Intel sucks (management and many employees) and they always have. It's a skanky company that cheats customers whenever possible. This kind of dishonest behavior is not new and for those that remember the last 10-15 years, they milked all customers by simply sorting chips by speed (coming off the same wafer) and releasing the faster ones as a "NEW" product for more money, they had the whole 486 issue many years ago where they tried to cover up their math errors and didn't want to provide working chips saying "most customers don't need it", and they've gouged their way across the world for years with impunity until AMD started to provide a little competition.
That's not to say that MS is innocent in this either. Vista is bloatwear that was designed to do nothing but churn accounts for revenue. What does it really do that XP didn't do better and faster in most cases? From my 2 years of experience, the answer is "nothing", except the UAC is more annoying than anything XP ever had. Some claim to fame.....
Sadly, anyone that thinks cheesy apple is going to be any better is severely delusional. Apple/Jobs is another skanky organization that routinely screws its less-than-bright sycophant customers. Joining a group like that is even more unappealing than putting up with MS...
All you are trying to do is getting the most working die out of a wafer. It doesn't mean the lower speed die are defective. All it means is that has failed some test at the top speed maybe leakage or speed or something else, but works fine with the same expected reliability at lower speed.
- by JCCox November 23, 2008 2:10 AM PST
- I'm always surprised by how low these companies will sink to make a profit. Both Intel and Microsoft are market leaders and I would expect more from them.
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