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Microsoft Begs Hardware Makers To Take Support Seriously
Posted by
samzenpus
on Wed Nov 05, 2008 10:32 PM
from the cry-me-a-river dept.
from the cry-me-a-river dept.
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."
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Submission: Microsoft begs hardware makers: don't screw Win 7 by Anonymous Coward
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Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal (Score:5, Funny)
The Year of Linux on the Desktop is at hand!
Parent
Make it measurable (Score:5, Interesting)
I know you're joking, but there will never be a Year of the Linux Desktop until there's a clear definition of what it actually means. If it's not measurable, there's nothing to aim for and it'll forever just be a joke.
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Re:Make it measurable (Score:5, Funny)
If it's not measurable, there's nothing to aim for and it'll forever just be a joke.
Crap, he's onto us guys! Everybody grab as many memes as you can carry and hop down to the bomb shelter!
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Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal (Score:5, Funny)
Some browsers no support having more than one window open at a time. You might try to get one of those.
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Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal (Score:4, Insightful)
I think that the lesson here is that hardware support is very variable, on any OS.
I bought a digital TV card for my box at home, running Kubuntu, and it was the simplest installation of anything I have ever done. Pop it in, it just worked. No driver installs, no nothing.
I also bought a cheap webcam. On Linux, plug and go. On Windows, even the supplied disk of drivers failed to install (Error -1: Could not configure driver or some such nonsense), and then the drivers from the website regularly cause BSOD.
On the other hand, the in-built sound system (some Intel chipset) on my home box is complete pain in the ass under Linux. I've never got the mike input to work properly.
It is nice to see that some hardware makers are beginning to actively support Linux, or at least allow Linux developers to actively support their stuff by supplying test units and documentation.
Parent
Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal (Score:5, Informative)
As the original article points out, it's a pretty meaningless statistic. Hardware support only matters to users when it's hardware they own. Linux supports an obscure SCSI card that only three people own - great if you're one of those three people, irrelevant otherwise. FreeBSD supports all of the hardware (with the possible exception of the modem - I don't have a phoneline, so I've not tried it) in my ThinkPad, so do I care that Linux and Windows support more devices in total? OS X supports everything in my MacBook Pro, so do I care that Windows supports more devices?
I used to have a gaming mouse that was supported by Linux but not Windows (it shipped with drivers for Win98, which didn't work with 2K and the manufacturer never supported 2K). Did it matter to me that Windows supported vastly more hardware than Linux at the time? No, because it didn't support my hardware. Same with my VooDoo 2 - Microsoft changed the driver model with Windows 2000 to prevent 3D-only cards working. I could still play GLQuake under Linux, but not under Windows. Again, the fact that 2K had better support in general meant nothing to me. Only the specific cases of failure mattered (and the fact that Linux didn't support my NIC or modem at the time was equally frustrating).
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Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal (Score:5, Insightful)
Whilst saying "You create a device, you write the driver" is perfectly reasonable, it's less reasonable to say, "We're releasing yet another version of Windows. We need new drivers for all of your hardware. Go away and write them for us".
This means a lot of extra expenditure for the hardware manufacturers every time that Microsoft release a new version of Windows. Is it surprising that they might be a bit reluctant to comply?
Parent
Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't Microsoft supposed to be the poster child for things like this? "You can't get drivers on Linux because of NDAs, etc." If you _can_ get NDAs and you _are_ filthy rich, and would like to make a superior product, go out and DO IT. Not whine and beg.
MS at least could do it if HW vendors would cooperate, which many would. But at the same time it's not like MS could just dump money into this and have it be sustainable; maintaining drivers for all the HW out there they want to support would be an enormous effort.
Making a wild guess, I wouldn't be surprised if it'd double the cost of Windows. (I seem to remember driver code being at least about half of the size of the Linux kernel, so this guess isn't completely out there.) HW would be cheaper, but basically people who buy little and/or common hardware would be subsidizing the cost of driver development for people who got more exotic hardware. I think it makes far more sense to tie the cost of developing the driver with the HW that it's for.
Also remember the "you create a device, you write the driver, we change the API, we beg you to update all your drivers to the latest beta API, with all nifty DRMs and UACs."
There's a new version of Windows issued what, every 3 years on average? (At least now that 9x and NT have converged.) Let's see, NT 4 was late '96, 2000 was 2000, XP was 2001, Vista was very late 2006 or very early 2007. 4 versions in 10 years, so just over 3 years is about right. (Windows 7 is scheduled for late 2009 or early 2010, which is about another 3 years.) The driver model changes even less frequently. (E.g. my impression is that you can use basically the same code for 2000 and XP.)
Not only that, but the changes for Vista were largely rather for the better, with MS trying to push most drivers out into userspace (where they can't cause bluescreens).
Contrast this situation to Linux, which almost has a stated goal to NOT have a stable driver API. This works fine for them, but if what you want is a stable kernel interface Windows is about as stable as you're going to get.
Parent
Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal (Score:4, Funny)
That is been becoming more obvious every year. ;-)
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Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal (Score:4, Insightful)
You realize what they're really asking... they want OEMS to spend $250K+ of their OWN MONEY so that EACH device they've ever sold works nicely with Windows 7 and MICROSOFT looks good.
All the Linux detractors really think about that...
Now think where linux would be if hardware manufacturers spent 1/10 that much contributing drivers to Linux for each device they sold versus the zero they contribute now.
Parent
Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal (Score:5, Funny)
They'll have to pry my Wang from my cold, dead fingers!
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Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Serious case of inept management syndrome (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Why bother? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why would hardware manufacturers bother to write drivers for a Windows Beta release? Especially one that probably won't be released for several years, and the driver requirements and API and such are likely to change several times before then. So many people are happy with XP or Linux, they can wait until the first RC to come out (Microsoft calls it Gold).
Re:Why bother? (Score:5, Interesting)
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?!
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
The Year of Linux on the Desktop
Re:Why bother? (Score:5, Funny)
let's just spin that a little, the 21st century will be the century of Linux on the desktop
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Re:Why bother? (Score:5, Funny)
let's just spin that a little, the 24th century will be the century of Linux on the desktop
There, fixed that for you.
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Re:Why bother? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Why bother? (Score:4, Interesting)
What is with all these Slashdot users who "lost the driver disc"?
The first thing I do with any driver disc (or any other software, for that matter) is copy it to my install respository that sits on a RAID array and is backed up regularly. I pretty much never clean that up, so I have drivers for hardware I don't own anymore.
A quick check shows I have Soundblaster drivers from 14 years ago.
Despite being such a pack rat, and literally keeping everything there (like install source for the last 3 versions of MS Office, every game I've ever purchased, etc.), it only takes up 330GB, which is less than $50 worth of disk space.
Parent
Re:Why bother? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re:Why bother? (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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Re:Why bother? (Score:5, Informative)
Mostly we don't because of things like this:
Creative Goes After Driver Modder [slashdot.org]
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Re:Why bother? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Why bother? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Why bother? (Score:5, Informative)
Enjoy.
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Re:Why bother? (Score:4, Funny)
Of course he has filed a detailed bug report.
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I can't believe Vista drivers don't work... (Score:4, Interesting)
After all the runaround with drivers for Vista, they completely changed the driver model again?
What kind of idiots are they employing?
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Re:Why bother? (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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Standards (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Standards (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re:Standards (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Why take support seriously? (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft doesn't, why should hardware makers?
Microsoft needs to take support seriously. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:4, Funny)
Copying files to and from a network was excruciatingly slow - how did that get past Microsoft's QA?
What QA?
Parent
Re:Microsoft needs to take support seriously. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Microsoft needs to take support seriously. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
hrrr (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft begs hardware OEMs to write drivers. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
If I was a hardware person... (Score:4, Insightful)
...I'd be already over this after just having had to do it all on Vista. Now they're going to have to go through the same thing immediately, which I suspect most of them won't bother doing, thinking "oh, it's years away from release".
I don't know if Vista driver support has improved significantly since its release (surely it has; I'm still happily running XP), but I suspect there's still a lot of consumer demand for certain/older driver fixes for Vista that are still on the TODO list for many hardware developers.