Class action suit against Microsoft gets greenlight

[eppur_se_muova]

Source: AP/CNN

February 23 2008: 4:21 PM EST

SEATTLE (AP) -- -- A federal judge said Friday that consumers may go ahead with a class action lawsuit against Microsoft Corp. over the way it advertised computers loaded with Windows XP as capable of running the Vista operating system.

The lawsuit said Microsoft's labeling of some PCs as "Windows Vista Capable" was misleading because many of those computers were not powerful enough to run all of Vista's features, including the much-touted "Aero" user interface.

U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman certified the class action suit but whittled down its scope to focus primarily on whether Microsoft's "Vista Capable" labels created artificial demand for computers during the 2006 holiday shopping season, and inflated prices for computers that couldn't be upgraded to the full-featured version of Vista, which was released at the end of January 2007.

Neither of the two people who filed the original lawsuit participated in a program Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500) devised to help people who bought new computers before Vista's launch upgrade later to the new operating system, but they argued nonetheless that people who bought "Vista Capable" computers were harmed because they could only run a basic version of Vista.

Read more: http://money.cnn.com/2008/02/23/technology/vista_classaction.ap/index.htm?cnn=yes

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I guess it depends on what the meaning of the word "capable" is ...

[Neshanic]

1. So will there be a class action suit for "Vista Ready?"

It's not like they did not ask for this.

They have as many versions as Baskin Robbins has ice cream, then have hidden little tidbits that are only on one version and not another. Then they release it so numbnuts like HP can then say they do not have printer drivers for Vista, so tough shit, go buy another one.

Entire lines of printers useless, scanners...

Me being one of their biggest supporters, but they pushed that cute break it into a million versions like Office, they need to get smacked.