According to the Guardian, Bill Veghte, from Microsoft’s Windows group, had plenty to say to the room filled with financial representatives from the likes of Merrill Lynch, JP Morgan, and Credit Suisse. He stated; "The final piece of it is what we do with our PC partners, whether that be HP or Dell or Sony or the many others that are a key part of the Windows ecosystem. We worked subsequent to general availability, while working with each one of these vendors to do what we called the Windows Vista Velocity Program. We think of this as running a set of those systems and the entire software load that they have on them through a very extensive set of tests to measure everything from reliability to security to compatibility, boot time, and more. We ran over 280 systems through that process and you’re starting to see the results of that in the market today."
In the minds of Microsoft execs, the problem lies with the fact that Vista is deployed on such a wide variety of PC builds, from a variety of manufacturers. A configuration from one brand might yield completely different results then that of another. For example, you can take the same laptop and pre-configure it one way and you get almost instantaneous boot-times, and fantastic battery life. If you pre-configure it with software in another way you get long boots, and much less battery life. Microsoft, as part of their restructuring plan, plans to educated its OEM providers on these subjects to try an curb any negative compatibility issues at the source.
Bad memories aside, you have to hand it to Microsoft for taking a proactive approach to changing the image of its bread-and-butter OS, but I guess only time will tell if the plan actually pays off.
From : http://vista.blorge.com/
