Is Microsoft ‘capable’ of stopping Vista Capable lawsuit?

By Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 11 March 2008 07:22

Opinion and Analysis

Microsoft would dearly love the Vista Capable lawsuit to just go away, but once the wheels of justice start grinding, can any amount of grease stop the squeaky wheel?

Microsoft’s Vista Capable class action lawsuit is in the news again, this time because Microsoft wants an appeals court to reverse the decision to have granted the case official ‘class action’ status.

The whole situation bubbled up because a number of consumers felt duped by the Vista Capable sticker that implied a computer with such a label would be able to run Vista, presumably at least the ‘Home Premium’ version of Vista with the fancy Aero graphics, instead of the Vista Home Basic version which had no such capability.

Of course Microsoft’s assertions that Vista Basic is a more advanced operating system than Windows XP and is indeed a version of Vista do hold some truth, especially today after numerous reliability and service updates, new drivers and more.

But back when Vista was first released, any version of Vista, be it the Basic edition all the way through to the Ultimate edition, certainly felt like a ‘downgrade’ for many because of all the driver and software compatibility issues – especially when no such issues occurred with the 2006 and 2007 era XP.

While Microsoft wasn’t “lying” when they said Vista Capable computers could run Vista, exactly which version of Vista was the issue, so much so that even high-level Microsoft executives were fooled, buying machines that, in the end, simply didn’t have the graphical grunt to run Aero, and thus had a hard time with multimedia applications, even something as simple as the Windows Movie Maker.

A famous line from one of the many emails leaked from the legal process has Mike Nash, senior Microsoft exec, complaining that his new Sony laptop was little more than a “$2100 email machine”, while Microsoft COO John A Shirley had to stick with XP on one machine because of the lack of Vista drivers.

Nash complained that his Sony laptop had a 915 Intel chipset, and that he’d purchased the machine with his own money ($$$ as he put it), presumably implying that it wasn’t even a company machine. His email noted that: "Are we seeing this from a lot of customers? I know that I chose my laptop (a Sony TX770P) because it had the vista logo and was pretty disappointed that it not only wouldn't run Glass, but more importantly wouldn't run Movie Maker."

Of course the situation is different today – but this class action lawsuit is about the past, where the so-called misleading stickers were in use to convince consumers that computers on sale in stores would be good enough to run Vista.

So, what’s Microsoft asking for now? Please read onto page 2.