Microsoft owns up to Vista’s flaws (sort of)

I love lawsuits. The smell of money has a way of dredging up all sorts of interesting and (previously) confidential information.

Take the case of the internal Microsoft email thread that surfaced recently in the wake of the pending “Vista Capable” class action suit. Here you have Steve Sinofsky, the newly appointed head of the Windows development team, confessing that Microsoft knew Vista wasn’t ready to ship in late 2006. As he puts it:

“No one really believed we would ever ship so they didn’t start the work until very late in 2006.”

It sounds to me like he’s admitting that even Microsoft’s own developers had given up on ever getting Vista out the door. Of course, once they realized they were facing a real ship date (and not yet another moving target), the panic set in and they had to scramble to to meet the November RTM deadline. In other words, Vista RTM was the product of several weeks of Red Bull-infused “all nighters.”

Sweet!

But the really juicy part comes later in the exchange. Here, Sinofsky points out that — even after the OS went RTM — a great many Windows XP drivers “didn’t really work under Vista.” He further explains that the fault lay with the “associated applets” — i.e., the Control Panel icons, Task Bar widgets and shell extensions — which would not “run within the constraints of the security model or the new video/audio driver models.”

How nice!

So, basically, they knew Vista would break a whole lot of stuff (Sinofsky admits that even his own home printer wouldn’t work with the RTM drop), yet they kept their mouths shut and shipped the OS anyway. Not exactly what you’d call “full disclosure,” but then again forthrightness has never been one of Microsoft’s shortcomings.

Of course, those of us who’ve been using Vista since the early betas knew all of this, at least empirically. After dozens of bad driver experiences you begin to suspect that Microsoft’s vaunted backwards compatibility is not what it should be.

Now, with the Sinofsky comments coming to light, we can finally confirm what we all believed to be the case: That UAC was more than just an annoyance. It actually broke things. Important things. Like the UI mechanisms for myriad device drivers.

The folks at Microsoft keep asking us to trust them: That they know what they’re doing; that the changes they’re making are for the best; and that they’ll preserve our investments in each generation of Microsoft technology. But when the “dirty laundry” gets aired, and I come across exchanges like this one, I can’t help but feel a bit betrayed.

Note to Microsoft: If you’re trying to implement an important and worthwhile new technology — like UAC — and you know you need to break some stuff to get it done, please just own up the the problem and let the IT community make up its own mind. Because, chances are good that — if you deal with us honestly and present your case convincingly — we’ll accept the “no pain, no gain” logic and go along with you. But playing “hush-hush” with a major compatibility issue when your own people are struggling with the problem, well that’s just bad form all the way around.