They Criticized Vista. And They Should Know

They Criticized Vista. And They Should Know. - New York Times

Turns out that even higher-up's in Microsoft's ranks thought this whole Vista thing stunk. About a year ago, my firm was planning on definitely upgrading to Vista sometime this past fall -- it's now March, and I haven't heard anything more about it. Each day, Vista is looking more and more like the next Windows ME.

These lines from the article left me stunned in particular:

"In early 2006, Microsoft decides to drop the graphics-related hardware requirement in order to avoid hurting Windows XP sales on low-end machines while Vista is readied. [...] A semantic adjustment is made: Instead of saying that a PC is “Vista Ready,” which might convey the idea that, well, it is ready to run Vista, a PC will be described as “Vista Capable,” which supposedly signals that no promises are made about which version of Vista will actually work."

Eh.... does anyone else think that, to the average consumer, "ready" and "capable" mean exactly the same damn thing? I'm sorry, when someone tells me that something is "capable" of doing something, I don't take it to mean that "there's no promises that it can actually do it" -- I take it to mean that it can, without any problems.