The OEMs were apparently screaming warnings to Microsoft early on about Vista.  Funny thing though…Microsoft didn’t listen…

Dell slams Microsoft over Windows Vista launch

A leaked Dell presentation accused Microsoft of making late changes to Windows Vista which forced key hardware partners to "limp out with issues" when the OS launched last year.

"Late OS code changes broke drivers and applications, forcing key commodities to miss launch or limp out with issues," said one slide in a Dell presentation dated March 25, 2007, about two months after Vista’s launch at retail and availability on new PCs.

The criticism was just one of many under the heading ‘What did not go well?’

Others ranged from knocks against Vista’s Windows Anytime Upgrade scheme, an in-place upgrade option, to several slams on ‘Windows Vista Capable’, the marketing programme that targeted PC buyers shopping for machines in the months leading up to Vista’s debut.

Funny how all the problems with Vista can be boiled down to two things: Microsoft’s tyrannical software license branding/activation scheme, and Vista’s locking down of the hardware to enforce film and music industry anti-piracy schemes. 

In an email to CEO Steve Ballmer written less than three weeks after he took over the post, Sinofsky [chief of Windows development] spelled out his three reasons why Vista stumbled out the gate.

"No one really believed we would ever ship so they didn’t start the work until very late in 2006," Sinofsky said. "This led to the lack of availability [of device drivers]."

Okay…that’s bullshit.  The reason why hardware vendors got started late, was because they kept having to start over.  That’s right there in Sinofsky’s points two and three: 

Next on his list: Changes to the operating systems’ video and audio infrastructure. "Massive changes in the underpinnings for video and audio really led to a poor experience at RTM," he said. "This change led to incompatibilities. For example, you don’t get Aero with an XP driver, but your card might not (ever) have a Vista driver."

Finally, said Sinofsky, other changes in Vista blocked Windows XP drivers altogether. "This is across the board for printers, scanners, WAN, accessories and so on. Many of the associated applets don’t run within the constraints of the security model or the new video/audio driver models."

The hardware driver issues arise from Microsoft’s changes to the hardware API to prevent anyone from tapping a pure digital signal and thereby bypassing Vista’s DRM.  Microsoft has gone as far as to demand that video and audio circuitry not provide any way for a signal to be tapped directly from the hardware, as a requirement for Vista certification. 

The problems with Anytime Upgrade revolved around the fact that you had to have your original install disks so the software could verify that you had a non-pirated copy of Windows XP before it would install Vista.  A lot of folks didn’t get those from the hardware vendors.  Others had trouble with the validation process that resulted in their computers being rendered inoperable.  Some were told that their license was invalid, even though they had legitimately purchased it, and then found they could not downgrade back to XP.  For many it was a nightmare.

This is what happens when you put profit over reliability.  Software license branding, digital rights management, all add complexity to operating system software, which needs to be as straightforward and elegantly designed as possible for the sake of reliability.  But the only thing Microsoft and Hollywood give a good goddamn about in terms of reliability is the sound of the cash register.  Microsoft became a multi-billion dollar company distributing software that could be easily copied, and for them to get pissed off enough about piracy that they’re willing to break your computer to make sure it doesn’t have an unlicensed copy of Windows running on it is on its face more a measure of their corporate greed then how bad the problem of software piracy may have been.  Windows piracy couldn’t have been so bad if honest software purchasers made Bill Gates a billionaire fifty-six times over could it?   Unless of course, even that wasn’t enough money for him.

This is why I’m running Linux at home, and a smattering of Apple Macs.  Yes, iTunes has DRM embedded in it too, but Apple seems not as paranoid about it as Redmond.  And Linux is open source, so I don’t have to worry that if I have a hardware failure my OS won’t work anymore when I swap out whatever broke with something new.  Amazon.Com is selling DRM free music now that I can play on both iTunes and my Linux boxes just fine.  I don’t need Microsoft anymore in my home anymore.  And the fact is that Linux is a mature enough technology now that most folks, who just use their computers for email, text editing, maybe a little checkbook balancing and web surfing would have no trouble using it at all.

For the moment, it looks like most people are standing pat on XP, or even older versions of Windows.  They don’t see the need to upgrade, especially when Microsoft keeps making the upgrade path more and more onerous.  Vista is costly not only for the software itself but the hardware you have to buy to run it smoothly.  It didn’t have to be this way.  Microsoft could have had a hit on their hands if they’d produced Vista for their customers, and not their stockholders and Hollywood media moguls.  Greed and paranoia about piracy are killing the music industry.  It’ll do the same to the big software companies too if they want it to.

According to the emails made public last week, Microsoft will apply the lessons it learned with Vista the next time around. "There is really nothing we can do in the short term," noted Joan Kalkman, the general manager of OEM and embedded worldwide marketing, in a message written a week after Sinofsky’s. "In the long term we have worked hard to establish and have committed to an OEM Theme for Windows 7 planning.

Committed to an OEM Theme for Windows 7 planning.  Committed to an OEM Theme for Windows 7 planning.  Committed to an OEM Theme for Windows 7 planning.  Take that apart and try to figure out what it means.  Go ahead.  I give Microsoft another decade before it completely implodes.  Nobody cares about their goddamned slogans and buzzwords anymore.  It all sounded so cool back when Microsoft was a bunch of bratty young computer geeks running rings around stogy old IBM, but it just doesn’t fucking cut it now. 

It was never about the promise of the personal computer was it Bill?  It was never about taking technology out of the hands of big corporations and their mammoth data processing centers and putting it on people’s desktops and giving them control over their own data and empowering them.  It was all about money wasn’t it Bill?  Software was never about empowering people, it was just a way for you to become rich.  And now you’re even bigger then IBM, stodgier, and way more paranoid, and all the little computer geek children are writing Open Source software now that anyone can copy and modify and use however they want to and running Linux and BSD and they don’t give a shit about Microsoft.  And they’re wearing t-shirts that say, In a world without fences, who needs Gates?