New Potential Villain in 'Vista Capable' Case
The revelations from the ongoing and high-profile Vista Capable class action
lawsuit against Microsoft continue. (Check out the entire litany of subpoenaed
e-mails in a huge PDF file
here.)
Apparently, a surprisingly (to us, anyway) large percentage of Vista crashes
in the operating system's early months were caused by
dodgy
drivers from NVIDIA.
This lawsuit thing just gets better and better -- it's full of hilarious
e-mails, revelations of decisions that favored one partner over another
(Intel seems to have benefited, while HP kind of got
the shaft) and vendors on the block for supposedly coming up with faulty
drivers or no drivers at all. Highly entertaining, the whole thing. But is this
scenario all that unusual, really?
We wonder, and we really don't think that it is. Microsoft is a big company,
and Vista is a big, complicated product. We're guessing that a lot of "compromises"
happen between vendors and partners in the engineering and marketing of major
releases, and we know that the first release of any product -- especially an
OS -- can be buggy, to say the least.
All we're seeing with this lawsuit is how the sausage got made (a process once
explained to your editor in excruciating detail by a well-meaning woman from
the South of France...over lunch) and how it always gets made. The fact that
the sausage itself (Vista) is mostly still sitting
in the butcher's freezer rather than being gobbled up by hungry consumers
and enterprises is probably the result of a combination of factors, only a few
of which were revealed in the lawsuit's e-mail collection.
In other words, while the e-mails from the lawsuit are great entertainment
(seriously, print them out and read them on your next flight), we really doubt
that they reveal business practices that are all that out of the ordinary for
Microsoft or for any other big technology vendor. And if Vista isn't a success,
its relative failure is down to more than just a botched marketing campaign
-- a lot more, actually.
What we're wondering, though, is whether the Vista Capable saga has shaken
your faith in Microsoft and the way it does business or has changed your view
of the company at all. How much do you care about this lawsuit and its implications,
and what's your reaction to it? Sound off to RCPU at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on March 31, 2008