[Infowarrior] - They Criticized Vista. And They Should Know

[Richard Forno]

March 9, 2008
Digital Domain
They Criticized Vista. And They Should Know.
By RANDALL STROSS

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/business/09digi.html?pagewanted=print


ONE year after the birth of Windows Vista, why do so many Windows XP users
still decline to ³upgrade²?

Microsoft says high prices have been the deterrent. Last month, the company
trimmed prices on retail packages of Vista, trying to entice consumers to
overcome their reluctance. In the United States, an XP user can now buy
Vista Home Premium for $129.95, instead of $159.95.

An alternative theory, however, is that Vista¹s reputation precedes it. XP
users have heard too many chilling stories from relatives and friends about
Vista upgrades that have gone badly. The graphics chip that couldn¹t handle
Vista¹s whizzy special effects. The long delays as it loaded. The
applications that ran at slower speeds. The printers, scanners and other
hardware peripherals, which work dandily with XP, that lacked the necessary
software, the drivers, to work well with Vista.

Can someone tell me again, why is switching XP for Vista an ³upgrade²?

Here¹s one story of a Vista upgrade early last year that did not go well.
Jon, let¹s call him, (bear with me ‹ I¹ll reveal his full identity later)
upgrades two XP machines to Vista. Then he discovers that his printer,
regular scanner and film scanner lack Vista drivers. He has to stick with XP
on one machine just so he can continue to use the peripherals.

Did Jon simply have bad luck? Apparently not. When another person, Steven,
hears about Jon¹s woes, he says drivers are missing in every category ‹
³this is the same across the whole ecosystem.²

Then there¹s Mike, who buys a laptop that has a reassuring ³Windows Vista
Capable² logo affixed. He thinks that he will be able to run Vista in all of
its glory, as well as favorite Microsoft programs like Movie Maker. His
report: ³I personally got burned.² His new laptop ‹ logo or no logo ‹ lacks
the necessary graphics chip and can run neither his favorite video-editing
software nor anything but a hobbled version of Vista. ³I now have a $2,100
e-mail machine,² he says.

It turns out that Mike is clearly not a naïf. He¹s Mike Nash, a Microsoft
vice president who oversees Windows product management. And Jon, who is
dismayed to learn that the drivers he needs don¹t exist? That¹s Jon A.
Shirley, a Microsoft board member and former president and chief operating
officer. And Steven, who reports that missing drivers are anything but
exceptional, is in a good position to know: he¹s Steven Sinofsky, the
company¹s senior vice president responsible for Windows.

Their remarks come from a stream of internal communications at Microsoft in
February 2007, after Vista had been released as a supposedly finished
product and customers were paying full retail price. Between the nonexistent
drivers and PCs mislabeled as being ready for Vista when they really were
not, Vista instantly acquired a reputation at birth: Does Not Play Well With
Others.

We usually do not have the opportunity to overhear Microsoft¹s most senior
executives vent their personal frustrations with Windows. But a lawsuit
filed against Microsoft in March 2007 in United States District Court in
Seattle has pried loose a packet of internal company documents. The
plaintiffs, Dianne Kelley and Kenneth Hansen, bought PCs in late 2006,
before Vista¹s release, and contend that Microsoft¹s ³Windows Vista Capable²
stickers were misleading when affixed to machines that turned out to be
incapable of running the versions of Vista that offered the features
Microsoft was marketing as distinctive Vista benefits.

Last month, Judge Marsha A. Pechman granted class-action status to the suit,
which is scheduled to go to trial in October. (Microsoft last week appealed
the certification decision.)

Anyone who bought a PC that Microsoft labeled ³Windows Vista Capable²
without also declaring ³Premium Capable² is now a party in the suit. The
judge also unsealed a cache of 200 e-mail messages and internal reports,
covering Microsoft¹s discussions of how best to market Vista, beginning in
2005 and extending beyond its introduction in January 2007. The documents
incidentally include those accounts of frustrated Vista users in Microsoft¹s
executive suites.

Today, Microsoft boasts that there are twice as many drivers available for
Vista as there were at its introduction, but performance and graphics
problems remain. (When I tried last week to contact Mr. Shirley and the
others about their most recent experiences with Vista, David Bowermaster, a
Microsoft spokesman, said that no one named in the e-mail messages could be
made available for comment because of the continuing lawsuit.)

The messages were released in a jumble, but when rearranged into
chronological order, they show a tragedy in three acts.

Act 1: In 2005, Microsoft plans to say that only PCs that are properly
equipped to handle the heavy graphics demands of Vista are ³Vista Ready.²

Act 2: In early 2006, Microsoft decides to drop the graphics-related
hardware requirement in order to avoid hurting Windows XP sales on low-end
machines while Vista is readied. (A customer could reasonably conclude that
Microsoft is saying, Buy Now, Upgrade Later.) A semantic adjustment is made:
Instead of saying that a PC is ³Vista Ready,² which might convey the idea
that, well, it is ready to run Vista, a PC will be described as ³Vista
Capable,² which supposedly signals that no promises are made about which
version of Vista will actually work.

The decision to drop the original hardware requirements is accompanied by
considerable internal protest. The minimum hardware configuration was set so
low that ³even a piece of junk will qualify,² Anantha Kancherla, a Microsoft
program manager, said in an internal e-mail message among those recently
unsealed, adding, ³It will be a complete tragedy if we allowed it.²

Act 3: In 2007, Vista is released in multiple versions, including ³Home
Basic,² which lacks Vista¹s distinctive graphics. This placed Microsoft¹s
partners in an embarrassing position. Dell, which gave Microsoft a
postmortem report that was also included among court documents, dryly
remarked: ³Customers did not understand what ŒCapable¹ meant and expected
more than could/would be delivered.²

All was foretold. In February 2006, after Microsoft abandoned its plan to
reserve the Vista Capable label for only the more powerful PCs, its own
staff tried to avert the coming deluge of customer complaints about
underpowered machines. ³It would be a lot less costly to do the right thing
for the customer now,² said Robin Leonard, a Microsoft sales manager, in an
e-mail message sent to her superiors, ³than to spend dollars on the back end
trying to fix the problem.²

Now that Microsoft faces a certified class action, a judge may be the one
who oversees the fix. In the meantime, where does Microsoft go to buy back
its lost credibility?

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of
business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross at nytimes.com.