Vista-Capable? Don't Read Our Emails!

The "Vista-Capable" lawsuit has reached class-action status, and yesterday the judge in the case unsealed a set of Microsoft emails revealing what executives really felt about the issue.  Some of these have been excerpted before, but some have not, and all are interesting.

A federal judge today unsealed internal Microsoft e-mails that have been used to support the plaintiffs' case in the lawsuit over the "Windows Vista Capable" program. Snippets were previously read aloud in court, but the full messages go further to reveal extensive hand-wringing, at the highest levels of the company, over Windows Vista's hardware and software compatibility problems after the operating system was launched.

It is in an email from Steven Sinofsky that we see an particularly interesting and humorous quote:

No one really believed we would ever ship so they didn't start the work until very late in 2006. This led to the lack of availability. For example my home multi-function printer did not have drivers until 2/2 and even pulled their 1/30 drivers and re-released them (Brother).

We wonder how the OEMs feel about Windows 7.

Tags:  Vista, Email, Mail, cap, Read, EA, AP, AI