Was Intel behind the Vista junk PC scheme?
The real mover behind the ill-fated “Vista Capable PC” scheme may be Intel, not Microsoft, recent emails in the Vista “junk PC” lawsuit reveal. A Microsoft exec, in one of those emails, says that the scheme was launched to help Intel meet its quarterly earnings by selling older chipsets that couldn’t properly run Vista. Below are all the details, including email excerpts, and Microsoft back-biting about who was to blame. The recently unsealed Microsoft emails are part of the lawsuit against Microsoft for a marketing scheme in which people claim that Microsoft misled consumers into buying the Windows Vista Capable PCs, even though the PCs couldn’t run the most important features of Vista. Many of the emails show that Microsoft execs themselves were not at all happy with the marketing scheme, and it appears that they launched it to help Intel sell an aging chipset and meet quarterly earnings numbers. The chipset in question, 915, was not capable of running Windows Aero. The problem, thou
