Beyond Binary

A judge on Friday ruled that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will have to testify in a class action suit over the "Vista Capable" logo program that Microsoft ran ahead of the launch of Windows Vista.

Microsoft had sought to limit depositions in the case to former Windows executives Jim Allchin and Will Poole, both of whom have since left the company. However, the judge ruled against the software maker.

"The court appreciates that there are severe demands on Mr. Ballmer's time; however, a busy schedule cannot 'shield' an executive from discovery," Judge Marsha J. Pechman said in her ruling, which was posted on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer Web site.

The plaintiffs in the case have argued that Microsoft was misleading in labeling certain machines as Vista Capable even though they lacked the graphics power to run the operating system's more advanced features.

Ballmer will have to be deposed for no more than three hours some time within the next 30 days, Pechman ruled.

Already, the suit has proven to be a treasure trove of internal documents.

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."

There is a ton of interesting information in the documents that have been released as part of the Windows Vista Capable lawsuit.

There's the juicy e-mails that show Microsoft caving to pressure from Intel and lowering the graphics requirements to get the Vista Capable sticker. There's also Dell outlining all of the problems it had with Microsoft in getting Vista to market as well as with its many readiness programs.

For those that want to give the full documents a read, the Seattle Post-Intellingencer has posted the complete PDF files of the documents, linked to from this blog by Todd Bishop.

Another area that got some notice this week was the inordinate number of early Vista crashes that were attributed to Nvidia, according to a list from early 2007. Nvidia was cited as causing nearly 30 percent of early Vista crashes (the exact time of the report is not listed), while Microsoft itself was to blame for nearly 18 percent. Intel and ATI each accounted for about 9 percent of crashes, according to the documents.

"These issues are a year and a half old," Nvidia PR director Derek Perez said on Friday. Perez noted the company took a number of steps in response to the issues, including establishing a Web site where people could report such issues and said the company made significant progress in reducing those errors. "We continue to improve drivers," he said.

In a statement, Microsoft also pointed to the complexities inherent in creating new graphics drivers.

"Microsoft takes exhaustive steps in testing hardware compatibility internally, as well as by working directly with our partners, to address compatibility long before customers experience an issue," the software maker said. "However, testing can only be conducted under so many different circumstances, particularly with such an exceptionally complex code that graphic drivers have. Understanding this, Microsoft has set up a system to help quickly identify the problems, work to fix them and, if warranted, potentially push them through to customers via Windows Update. NVIDIA has taken similar steps, and since launching Windows Vista, Microsoft has seen great progress in addressing potential issues by NVIDIA."

One of the questions I have is which is worse--having buggy drivers, as Nvidia clearly did--or pushing Microsoft to lower its graphics requirements to include less-than-optimal graphics, as Intel appears to have done. Nvidia can and has improved its drivers, but there were a whole lot of systems pushed out in 2006 with the Intel graphics chip that did not initially qualify for the Vista capable logo.

After already unearthing some less-than-flattering e-mails, plaintiffs suing Microsoft over its "Vista Capable" logo program are seeking testimony from a number of computer makers and retailers as well as former Windows chief Jim Allchin.

According to a blog Tuesday by Todd Bishop of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the plaintiffs in the suit have subpoenaed Acer, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Sony, and Toshiba, along with retailers including Best Buy, Circuit City, Costco, OfficeMax, and Wal-Mart.

Check out Bishop's blog for more on the suit as well as links to the latest filings.

As happens every year or so, some juicy Microsoft e-mails have surfaced as part of litigation that the software maker is party to.

In this case, Microsoft is being sued over a program in 2006 that labeled some PCs as Windows Vista Capable ahead of the operating system's mainstream release in January 2007. As part of the discovery process, a number of e-mails have emerged with Microsoft executives discussing various problems with Vista as it came to market.

In one e-mail, Steven Sinofsky writes to Steve Ballmer that three factors were to blame for early Vista challenges.

First off, he said, "No one really believed we would ever ship so they didn't start the work until very late in 2006." He added that his Brother home printer didn't have drivers until after Vista's commercial launch.

Secondly, he said, major changes to the way Vista handles audio and video caused headaches, particularly for those upgrading from XP. Finally, he said, many Windows XP drivers didn't really work under Vista. "This is across the board for printers, scanners, wan, accessories (fingerprint readers, smartcards, tv tuners), and so on," Sinofsky wrote. "This category is due to the fact that many of the associated applets don't run within the constraints of the security model or the new video/audio driver models."

Sinofsky noted that Microsoft executive Orlando Ayala had stuck with XP because there was no Vista driver for his Verizon mobile wireless card. "The Vista Ready logo program required drivers available on (January 30). I think we had had reasonable coverage, but quality was uneven as I experienced," he wrote.

One of the key issues raised in the e-mail exchange was the fact that by loosening the rules for one of Intel's chip sets, Microsoft was creating a class of machines that were allowed to be marketed as Windows Vista Capable, even though those same machines would not be eligible to even get Vista Basic logo certification once the software was released. I raised this issue in an article back in the spring of 2006.

Sinofsky notes this issue in his e-mail, as do several other executives. "The '915' chipset which is not Aero capable is in a huge number of laptops and was tagged as 'Vista Capable' but not Vista Premium (ready)," he wrote. "I don't know if this was a good call."

The e-mail exchanges also include a note from Mike Ybarra to Jim Allchin saying that "We are caving to Intel." In the same e-mail, he notes that Microsoft was "really burning HP" which had agreed to build its machines with graphics chips that had a Vista-specific driver that could take advantage of the operating system's high-end interface features, unlike the aforementioned Intel 915 chipset.

These e-mails are particularly salient to this court case, in which Microsoft faces a class action suit over the fact that machines labeled as Windows Vista Capable were nonetheless not capable of running many of the operating system's features.

But the e-mails also show clearly that Microsoft executives saw early on that customers were likely to have negative experiences with the operating system, particularly when it came to compatibility with existing hardware. Sinofsky expressed surprise that Microsoft didn't get more complaints to its support lines, but said that he did not take that as a sign of satisfaction.

"I think we have a lot of new PCs, which helps and the hobbyist people who bought (packaged copies of Windows) just know what to do and aren't calling, but I know they are struggling," he said.