Another open letter to Bill Gates

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 06 February 2007 22:15

Opinion and Analysis

Despite the missing drivers, Vista on my Fujitsu Tablet PC, T4210 with 2Gb of RAM, has been very good. IE7 seems to want to crash every now and then – without gracefully offering to reload the last opened pages as happens with Maxthon (and from memory Firefox, which is loaded but not used very often). Maxthon is such a better browser than IE7, but it’s in Beta 2 at last and is finally getting a lot better in its latest incarnation, but I still find myself using IE7. I’ve found a few downloads for it, but they’re pretty unsophisticated to what’s built into Maxthon as standard, and what you can download for Firefox (which has some great stuff built-in, too).

I’ve heard the reports that IE8 is on the way, maybe sooner than we think. I certainly hope so – I don’t just live in Outlook or Word 2007, but on the web, too. Can it please have some of the cool features in Maxthon, like an undo button, mouse gestures and other cool things, along with robust plugins? I’ve seen it suggested that Microsoft buy Maxthon – this could be a very good idea to speed things up.

There’s plenty more, and no doubt things I’ve forgotten to mention, but one thing – why did you dare the hackers to attack Vista? Of course they haven’t needed your dare as an invitation to do so. They’re already doing it. I know you said in your Newsweek interview that there’s been a lot of security stuff included in Vista that will make things much harder.

But c’mon… Windows is the biggest target there is. Daring hackers to ‘bring it on’ is like poking a wasps nest with a stick, or going off to invade foreign hell holes without enough troops. I certainly hope Vista is as secure as you say it is, but weren’t there vulnerabilities disclosed pre-RTM, and haven’t there already been updates to Vista, even if they weren’t necessarily security related? I suppose it doesn’t really matter in one sense. The hackers are always going to hack. But is publicly goading them really necessary?

I also Microsoft can fix bugs as soon as you’re notified (or upon discovering them yourselves) – I can’t name specific examples but know there were plenty of holes in different things that weren’t patched up immediately. Windows Media DRM was hacked, and a patch was forthcoming in record time. I hope to see this kind of quick action when it comes to security updates in the future.

Some other things while I remember them. My dual-core Vista capable Tablet PC sometimes crashes upon sleep, or hibernate. Not very often, but it happens. It shouldn’t happen at all! Also, every now and then, after turning on from a hibernation, my screen goes a few shades lighter – I have to go from 32bit colour to 16bit and back again to fix it. Someone from Microsoft did contact me about this when I first wrote about it, and I’ve been able to send the Dxdiag and other info, but an update is still forthcoming (although the problem is intermittent and the last time I spoke with the Microsoft contact was just before last Christmas, and a whole lotta launch stuff, planning etc has been obviously going on since then, although I’m still expecting an update. Maybe it’s a driver thing, although the recent driver update for my integrated graphics card didn’t fix it as it has happened once more since then, too).

 I know there’s more that I’ll remember after publishing this letter to you. I don’t know if you’ll read it, and if you are reading it, I thank you in advance. I just hope you can do something about all of these things, starting with what should be an additional mantra for Steve Ballmer – it’s not just developers, developers, developers… it’s also… drivers, drivers, drivers! We all need the features on our computers to work. Microsoft can help make these drivers happen faster, along with a better IE8 and more.

Yours sincerely,

Alex Zaharov-Reutt