That’s Gonna Leave a Mark
Microsoft’s misleading “Vista Capable” ad campaign from a couple years ago could cost them up to nearly nine billion dollars:
Vista Home Basic is key to the lawsuit, which alleges that Microsoft’s Vista Capable program inflated the prices of PCs that could run only that edition and enticed users into buying machines that could not be later upgraded to any other version of Vista. Home Basic, the plaintiffs have contended, is not the “real” Vista, in large part because it lacks the Aero user interface.
Microsoft has denied that it duped consumers and has countered that Home Basic is a legitimate version of Vista.
Months before the “capable” campaign, I noted that to get the full benefits of then-unreleased Vista would require a DirectX 10 video card. At the time there were exactly two of those, and I think they cost something like $500 each — that’s nearly as much as entire computers bearing the “Vista Capable” sticker. First time I saw those stickers on el-cheapo Dell boxes, I knew Microsoft was scamming buyers.
And now it looks like Microsoft might have to pay for the scam, writing checks for $3.5-8.5 billion dollars.
Scam?
I don’t see how you can make any more of this another shakedown by lawyers.
I personally don’t run Vista, but when it was launched I looked into it and it was very clear to me that Vista Home Basic did not run Aero. So what? Aero is just one (in my opinion) minor feature of Vista. In all the blog posts and podcasts I have read/listened to about Vista, pro and con, I almost never here Aero mentioned. To say that Aero is THE key defining feature of Vista is ridiculous. What about UAC? the new Start menu? The Sidebar? Not that I care about any of these…
Do you think that taking nine billion dollars from Microsoft for a non-issue and giving it to lawyers who will give it to Democrats, who will find more non-issues for the lawyers to sue about makes good sense???
My biggest complaint about Vista is that I had to take it when I bought my new PC. It wouldn’t come with Windows XP, which was and probably still is a much better system.
I dearly look forward to the end of Microsoft’s monopoly and its stranglehold on innovation. (Yes, I know, tech geeks shed themselves of Microsoft long ago, but we can’t all be tech geeks, now can we?)
Do you think that taking nine billion dollars from Microsoft for a non-issue and giving it to lawyers who will give it to Democrats, who will find more non-issues for the lawyers to sue about makes good sense?
No. We could fold Microsoft into one bailout or another and give them fifteen billion in taxpayer money, from which they could give nine billion to lawyers, etc.
On the other hand, there’s no need for a cut-out man to get money from Microsoft to the Democratic party.