One of the common problems when Windows Vista was released was that of missing or non-working drivers. Microsoft massively reworked many of Windows' internal systems and frameworks, meaning lots of drivers broke, with most of them needing major work, and some even needed to be rewritten completely. Apparently, Microsoft didn't communicate this well enough with its hardware partners - or the partners were lazy, who knows - because many devices failed to work with Vista during its early months of being out in the wild. Microsoft is trying to keep this story from repeating itself, saying that everything that works on Vista should work on Windows 7. To gain a little more insight into this problem, Microsoft gave out some very interesting figures regarding driver installation failure rates.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2005-07-14
One thing that's always really ticked me off is the double standard.
If hardware doesn't work with Windows, it's the hardware manufacturer's fault for not writing a driver.
If the hardware doesn't work with {Mac OS X, Linux, BSD, BeOS, Solaris, etc.} it's {Apple, The Linux Community, The BSD Community, Be, Sun, etc.}'s fault.
What would be nice is if hardware followed specs (impossible for "new" devices, but those are rare) and you could just plug it in and get basic functionality with a built-in driver. Want to access advanced functionality or get the best performance? Then you install a driver from the manufacturer.
Member since:2006-02-05
Its simple. From the users point of view, they don't care WHY it is not working, or whose "fault" it is, they just care that the thing that they bought doesn't work right on operating system x. From a technical point of view, there are many reasons why something could or could not work, so saying it is because of a vendors driver is a fine thing to say.
I don't see how there is any double standard, it works the same for everyone.
Member since:
2006-01-16
What MS is essentially doing with posting these non-comparable figures and other publications about the drivers issue, is to blame others.
My perception is that MS is trying to tell "Our Vista OS is great, but was broken by third-party." What MS has to ask themselves is, why is Windows driver quality that bad? Drivers in other OSes like Linux almost always just work fine, out of the box, w/o any hassle.
It is the same with user-space software. The Windows platform suffers most from its heterogenically trashing Application base. Trashing in a sense of DLL-hell, privilegue abuse, etc.
MS needs to realize that blaming others won't help. The vendors of both drivers and applications are just trying to be nice citizens in a specific environment. MS makes the rules and gives example (with own applications), others just adhere to them.
One recent example regarding drivers: MS presented this new "my hardware" platform where for example a digital camera vendor could include his own crappy bling-bling interface and stuff. This is exactly what MS should teach them not to do. This bling-bling stuff is a real usability killer. The User should exactly _not_ be made aware of what kind of hardware he has. It should just work for him.