Email trail
Documents obtained during the discovery (documentary production) phase of a law suit brought against Microsoft include internal emails that must have had the plaintiffs’ lawyers rubbing their hands with glee.
The emails became public following a ruling on 28 February by a US District Court that the suit could become a class action.
The point at issue was limited to whether, over the 2006 Christmas period, the ‘Vista Capable’ sticker artificially inflated the price of PCs that could not handle the full Vista package.
The ruling opens the door for others, instead of suing separately, to join a suit originally brought by a couple of peeved Seattle purchasers of less-than fully Vista Capable PCs. Microsoft has appealed.
The hand-rubbing revelations in the emails include a high-level discussion regarding which Intel chipsets could be considered to be Vista Capable.
What follows is an excerpt from an email apparently sent by Steven
Sinofsky (pictured), currently senior VP for the Windows and Windows Live
Engineering Group, to CEO Steve Ballmer and copied to Bill Veghte and Jon DeVaan.
The subject was ‘RE: Vista’ and it was sent at 12:08 PM on 8th
February 2007.
'I don't know if this was a good call'
‘Intel has the biggest challenge. Their “945” chipset which is the baseline Vista set “barely” works right now and is very broadly used. The “915” chipset which is not Aero [capable] is in a huge number of laptops and was tagged as “Vista Capable” but not Vista Premium. I don’t know if this was a good call.’
The PCs in question could apparently only run Vista Home Basic, not Premium, and so could not use heavily advertised features such as Aero. And thereby hangs a tale of MS seemingly doing a favour that could only benefit Intel, with no sales upside for Vista.
The clear inference is that Intel’s 915 chipset could not handle Vista’s advanced graphics, so PCs with 915 embedded could not upgrade to Vista Premium and that the internal emails seem to confirm that MS execs chose to rescue Intel’s sales figures for the fourth quarter of 2006 by lowering the spec for the Vista Capable label.
Plaintiffs must argue that being denied Aero has significantly harmed them, although the cost of Premium and the hardware capable of running it was much greater.
NVIDIA was by far the biggest contributor to Vista crashes in the period coveredMS must argue that if plaintiffs really wanted Aero, they would have spent the extra money. And that Aero is really no big deal, anyway. A bit awkward, that, given Windows’ claim that Aero is ‘a truly next-generation desktop experience.’
The 156-page cache of revealing documents, which was made available on the web by Seattle PI newshound Todd Bishop here (warning: 3.6MB PDF), has plenty more to offer.
A chart headed ‘Crashes by organisation’, undated and stating only ‘2007’ as the period it covers, appears to list the origins of all the reported crashes in the time it covers.
The clear 'leader' of this chart is NVIDIA, which perhaps shockingly accounted for 28.8 percent of all crashes. It was followed by Microsoft with 17.9 percent, unknown with 17 percent, AMD/ATI with 9.3 percent and Intel with 8.8 percent.
Watch this space – there’s plenty more to come.
