Microsoft Begs Hardware Makers To Take Support Seriously

Banana ricotta pancakes writes "Microsoft has confirmed that there will be a widespread public beta of Windows 7 in early 2009, while urging device manufacturers to start immediate testing with its pre-beta release to avoid the widespread hardware compatibility problems that contributed so much to the negative perception of Vista. 'There is not another WinHEC planned before Windows 7 is released,' Microsoft has warned them. Better hope that testing goes well."

Standards

Nearly 2009 and we still can't plug in a printer and have it just work. The idea that any printer - consumer or professional - needs proprietary drivers that might have problems with Windows 7 is really sad. We need more standard HID devices, and better HID support in OSes.

Re:Standards

HID is a double edge sword. Take USB Mass Storage as an example, if there wasn't one, we might have file system tailor made for Flash memory now.
But now Mass Storage expose everything in simple linear blocks..., it's just not possible.

Well, I know the price might probably be much higher with much low adoption rate without Mass Storage HID...

Talking about Printer, there are actually PostScript standard which work reasonably well, except that you will lost some bells and whistles like Printer maintenance stuff. Microsoft also wants to push its XPS standard, which might be a good HID support candidates.

Re:Standards

Unfortunately, we have the curse of penny-pinching to blame for that one. Printers nice enough to have Postscript interpreters have been just working with nothing more than a ppd for longer than I've been alive. More recently, USB has a standardized printer class, and IPP for network printing is not exactly exotic.

I don't know exactly why the printers actually available(particularly the cheap ones) have resisted standardization so sharply; but the state of the market is terrible, as you note, despite their being good ways to do it. It isn't like the bad old days of USB webcams, where everybody rolled their own because no standards existed, people seem to be actively doing the wrong thing with printers.

Microsoft needs to take support seriously.

Microsoft needs to be worried about it's own quality control issues first.

Network copies were REALLY broken when Vista was released. Copying files to and from a network was excruciatingly slow - how did that get past Microsoft's QA?

Explorer still occasionally shits the bed for no apparent reason. Why is explorer still the shell of the operating system? Someone should tell Microsoft that Netscape is no longer a threat to them.

There are a ton of BONE-HEADED design decisions in Vista (try selecting a wireless network with less than 5 or 6 clicks).

The ugly truth is that hardware manufacturers are not the cause of Vista's "perception problem". Vista is the cause of Vista's perception problems.

-ted

Re:Microsoft needs to take support seriously.

Its an application like any other that can be killed, move, restarted, or even removed.

Except, of course, for the fact that killing the "root" explorer.exe ends up causing you pretty ugly problems.

For example, when you kill off the explorer.exe process controlling your taskbar and system tray, starting Explorer again usually leaves you with a mess, since the running tasks don't go back into the tray. Then, too, everything that was in the various "autorun" places gets run again because Explorer is too dumb to figure out this isn't the first time it is being run.

Basically, because Explorer is the display shell and hooks into so damn much, but it isn't really the root process for your login, the whole setup is so fragile that the only way to make sure everything ends up right is to log out and log back in.

hrrr

Dear hardware makers:

We first take the chance to declare you the cultprits of the vista fiasco, bad hardware makers!.

Now please be a good boy and support Vista 7 right away, we know this is a sudden move with so few months left for the beginning of 2009 and you are still trying to support Vista. But now we decided to release another OS, so bitch please support that one already, thanks.

Linux Drivers are more important.

The manufacturers should spend more time collaborating with the Ubuntu and Mandriva communities. Windows 7 will suck no matter how much effort the manufacturers put into it. Why waste the extra time on a sinking ship?

Microsoft begs hardware OEMs to write drivers.

Intro: "Microsoft has confirmed that there will be a widespread public beta of Windows 7 in early 2009, while urging device manufacturers to start immediate testing with its pre-beta release to avoid the widespread hardware compatibility problems that contributed so much to the negative perception of Vista."

Interesting.

Meanwhile, Linux driver developers are begging to write drivers (at no cost) for hardware OEMs.

http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS6669895837.html [desktoplinux.com]

As a hardware OEM, you would have to be thinking that it is going to cost you way, way less to get a working driver for your new product written for Linux.

Re:Why bother?

Maybe Microsoft should do what the Linux community does. Work with manufacturers to get the drivers written and then maintain the drivers for the manufacturers forever.

Ya, that's likely.

BTW - I own two webcams now. Neither work under Windows since I lost the driver disk (and those drivers were useless under XP64/Vista anyway), but they both work just fine under Linux. What's the world coming to?!

Re:Why bother?

Maybe Microsoft should do what the Linux community does. Work with manufacturers to get the drivers written and then maintain the drivers for the manufacturers forever.

Maybe the community should just step up and write them? I mean they do it for Linux, why not Microsoft? Plus, for any device supported under Linux, the hardest part of the work is already done... figuring out how to communicate with the device.

And don't whine about driver signing, if a large OSS group came to MS with a large body of updated drivers for x64, they'd take them in a heartbeat, sign them, and even stick them on the next Windows CD if we let them.

BTW - I own two webcams now. Neither work under Windows since I lost the driver disk (and those drivers were useless under XP64/Vista anyway), but they both work just fine under Linux. What's the world coming to?!

The difference is the manufacturer abandoned the hardware a couple years ago for Windows, while they never bothered to support Linux at all in the first place. So the community stepped up for Linux, because that was the only way it was going to happen, while the manufacturers did a passable job long enough for the hardware to be non-mainstream enough that most people really don't care.

Re:Why bother?

Maybe the community should just step up and write them? I mean they do it for Linux, why not Microsoft?

'Cause it's Microsoft. Really, there's no other reason than that. Why should we reward their reprehensible behaviour by adding valuable functionality to their systems?

If they don't have developers, their operating systems are useless. : D

Re:Why bother?

let's just spin that a little, the 21st century will be the century of Linux on the desktop

Re:Why bother?

let's just spin that a little, the 24th century will be the century of Linux on the desktop

There, fixed that for you.

Re:Why bother?

Actually, Houdini pulled it off [blogspot.com]


...the lengths some people will go to for a laugh...

Re:Why bother?

This [fodey.com]

Enjoy.

Re:Why bother?

you do realize that much of the "hardware" we have today is little more than application specific instruction processors (ASIPs) and memory on a board (or SoC). For these hardware devices, much of the development work is in the firmware running on the processors. Oh, and much of that code was probably written by the processor vendor, and likely was obtained under a license agreement that doesn't allow you to release it. Now, if the hardware device contains flash or an eeprom, this isn't really an issue, as the code for these processors can be stored on there. However, many store the program data in the driver. This has a couple advantages, it's cheaper to manufacture the device (fewer components), more reliable (fewer components to fail) and if a bug is discovered in the ASIP code, the manufacturer can release new device drivers that automatically update the firmware of the device, without forcing the user to manually update it. Seems like device manufacturers would have to be stupid not to upload binary blobs to their devices. These binary blobs can't be open source for the reasons outlined above, and thus the device driver cannot be added to the linux kernel.

Phil

Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal

I'm not sure that really has much to do with it. This isn't about MS keeping the OEMs from shipping other OSes, something that they are still pretty good at, this is about MS trying to get the device makers to ship drivers that don't suck, something that they've never had all that much luck with, though they seem to be very gradually improving.

MS doesn't have the power to coerce decent drivers out of the manufacturers ("Hmm, I see here that your latest wifi chipset driver has 37 unresolved trouble tickets. If you ever want your silicon to run on Windows again..."); but none of the device manufacturers have anything to gain from manipulating perceptions of windows. If one device vendor makes horrific drivers, consumers will blame windows; but OEMs will just drop that vendor. MS has a bit of power, with their driver certification stuff; but driver quality mostly comes down to the battle between the desire to save money by skimping on engineering and the desire to actually be able to sell products that don't ruin your reputation completely.

If MS were out there, begging vendors to write drivers for Windows, that would be a role reversal.

Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal

MS doesn't have the power to coerce decent drivers out of the manufacturers

No, but they do have the power to write drivers themselves (carrot) and they do have the power to maintain a public knowledge base of third-party driver problems (stick).

Microsoft is only in this mess because they've been pawning that responsibility off on OEMs for years.

Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal

No, but they do have the power to write drivers themselves (carrot)...

What? MS would have the same problem as Linux does, just to a lesser degree. HW manufactures would have to provide specs to MS, something they haven't done for Linux. The only saving grace would be that MS would be capable of signing an NDA with them.

Microsoft is only in this mess because they've been pawning that responsibility off on OEMs for years.

"You create a device, you write the driver" seems like a perfectly reasonable policy to me, at least for manufactures that don't open their specs to all.

Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal

Now that Microsoft are feeling the pinch of competition, they no longer have hardware manufacturers over a barrel. The hardware manufacturers now have the power to control the public perception of Windows, rather than Windows controlling the perception of hardware.

How did you come to this conclusion? The number of Windows users is still growing. OS X is taking a small percentage from that share, but their software is still restricted to their own hardware, making it very uninteresting for hardware manufacturers.

It's the fact that Windows is open to any hardware that makes manufacturers prefer this operating system. Also, the two factions live in symbiosis since none would exist without the other. Basically, Microsoft wants their software to work well and the manufacturers surely want their hardware to work well in what is to become the next major operating system that over 90% of the world's population uses.

Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal

Well, MS does have one major competitor, which has caused nontrivial trouble lately: its own older OSes. As much as I'd like it to be otherwise, I don't think that MS is under much immediate threat from Linux or OSX. However, watching the rather pitiful attempt to get the Vista launch off the ground suggested quite strongly that MS has a real problem with pushing its "ecosystem partners" to upgrade in sync. The whole Vista Read/Vista Capable thing, where MS basically screwed over buyers and retailers to let Intel unload their old graphics chips, the fact that NVidia couldn't be bothered to have drivers that actually worked for months after launch, having to extend XP availability several times, etc.

MS isn't going anywhere; but they face a real risk of getting bogged down in their own backwards compatibility. With Vista, they ran into the nasty trap of not being able to muster enough customer enthusiasm to drive support from hardware and software vendors, and not having enough support from hardware and software vendors to ensure safe upgrades for their customers. Vicious circle time. They'll pull through; because they have the bulk and the power; but that isn't a pretty dynamic.

Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal

<quote><p>Like Compaq, Unisys, SCS, Wang, et al, Microsoft is loosing the war and will be gone within the decade. Mark my words.</p></quote>

They'll have to pry my Wang from my cold, dead fingers!

Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal

I think the biggest sign of Microsoft's impending fall is the fact that idiot business guys are in charge now.

All the geeks that made Microsoft the behemoth that it is today are gone.

Ballmer and co are all that's left and it has been showing.

Serious case of inept management syndrome

I think the biggest sign of Microsoft's impending fall is the fact that idiot business guys are in charge now.

It's interesting you'd point that out. I was thinking something similar. Mostly in the way the request was worded. I've spent some time around inept managers and you can see a lot of the same in the summary:

"urging device manufacturers to start immediate testing with its pre-beta release" - Translation: Get on the ball and do our work for us.

"to avoid the widespread hardware compatibility problems that contributed so much to the negative perception of Vista" - Translation: Our failures are not our fault. They are your fault. Get on the ball and fix it.

"'There is not another WinHEC planned before Windows 7 is released,' Microsoft has warned them." - Translation: We have you by the balls. Don't make us squeeze. We want you to do things for our benefit, and we're unwilling to wait, or even to ask nicely.

Now, in contrast what they should have done is this.

Windows 7 is being released, and soon. Yeah, we screwed the pooch with Vista. But we'd like to fix things, and we'd like your help. Towards that end we are making a pre-release version of Windows 7 beta available to developers so we can make something that has the promise of Vista, but actually delivers. And we'll be holding several WinHEC sessions, to help you, our valued partners make this next Windows the best product it can be.

Engage us as coder geeks, and we would be far more happy to comply. Speak to us - geek to geek. Let us know why Windows 7 is exciting. And admit your mistakes with Vista, so you have some credibility when you try to engage us.

Of course, inept power happy managers would never say such a thing. And it's the product that suffers. I've seen it before, just never quite on this scale before. Treat your developers like peons and they will abandon you. Programmers tend to be a little rogue in their perceptions. I can see a great many people reading that press release and thinking "well screw that crap".

I certainly would.

Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal

2%? Already?
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