Vista Suit Has No Class
Often, I scratch my head over our legal system. Sometimes, juries seem to get it wrong, as they did with OJ. Other times, judges are the ones making random decisions. Case in point: A judge last week
denied class-action status for a suit claiming that Vista Capable computers were Vista Less than Capable. The PCs in question had the "Capable" logo, but barely supported the OS and only ran the lowest-end versions.
If you want to quibble over words and view "capable" as meaning "able to," then these machines are capable. But most of us see "capable" as "able to do something with some modicum of efficiency." A capable baseball pitcher isn't someone who's barely able to throw, but has some kind of true capacity.
Now people upset with Vista have to file separately. Great -- so you can pay a lawyer $10,000 to hopefully recover a grand or some from Microsoft. I doubt that Judge Marsha Pechman has spent much time using Vista with a gig of RAM!
Meanwhile, Emma Alvarado is also suing Microsoft, claiming it's unfair to pay for a Vista PC only to pay more to downgrade to XP, an older operating system. I hope Judge Pechman isn't hearing this case, too!
Posted by Doug Barney on February 23, 2009