Microsoft Internal Email about Vista Compatibility

2/29/2008 9:52:23 PM #

Steve,

Saw it yesterday, and read most of the PDF. Not pretty, though it shows among other things that MS was trying to support older Intel boards. All in all, the picture is not good, and I imagine may fuel yet another DoJ fiasco, where millions are spent, and much time wasted. In the end, either we pay the price for a wasted lawsuit, or for a successful one. Both will affect our pocketbooks adversely.

Bill Meyer

2/29/2008 10:35:32 PM #

Bill,
  It sounds more like MS was trying to prop up Intel sales more than support older boards which is interesting in and of itself. I particularly liked this quote from Mike Nash:

I know that I chose my laptop (a Sony TX770P) because it had the vista logo and was pretty disappointed that it not only wouldn't run Glass, but more importantly wouldn't run Movie Maker (I guess that is being addressed). I now have a $2100 email machine.

Steve Trefethen

2/29/2008 11:04:03 PM #

You may get some knee-jerk lawsuits by people that don't have much experience with large corporations but none of those will have teeth.  Agreements of this sort are common place in all levels of business and they are pretty much 80% of the conversation you have with partners, "what can we do to help you since you're helping us?  There is *nothing* illegal about this common *everyday* occurrence.  I was just in a meeting in fact where we were asked to reduce some features for an upcoming product to make it easier for one of our resellers to sell into their market.

Now, if there was proof that Microsoft and Intel were working in collusion to *exclude* other chip vendors, to somehow make it harder for HP to sell systems then that might hit a grey area but then again that is also part of *everyday* business relationships.  This is no different than a large restaurant chain having an exclusive agreement with a beverage company, part of their agreement isn't just that they *will* sell beverage X, but also that they *won't* sell beverage Y.  It's simply called an exclusivity agreement, just look at AT&T and the iPod.

What I found most interesting were Jim Allchin's comments basically saying "What in the hell is going on here and someone just screwed up."  My respect for him went up after reading that.

Shawn Oster

3/1/2008 12:02:19 AM #

Shawn,
  I could see lawsuits resulting from people buying a machines labeled as "Vista Capable" when it it only marginally supports Vista's features such as the laptop quote I mentioned. I don't see there being a problem with what Microsoft did WRT Intel.

As for respecting Jim Allchin I would agree.

Steve Trefethen

3/1/2008 1:34:08 AM #

Shawn,
I don't care about the suits from users, they won't have much impact. What I do care about is brain-dead anti-trust suits that are invoked to satisfy the ego of some young turks at DoJ, never yield anything of real value, and cost both the taxpayers and the end-users money. In essence, we pay for both sides of such pointless actions.

Steve,
I didn't write very clearly. I saw the same message you did -- MS propping up Intel sales, when Intel couldn't field suitable hardware. I also saw some distressing commentary about driver issues, and some other comments that seem to make plain that at least some of the folks inside MS were trying to make things go right.

But in the end, we got Vista, and that's just wrong!

Bill Meyer