"Documents unsealed last Thursday imply that the Microsoft CEO
was in on the decision two years ago to lower technical
requirements for its Vista operating system as a favor to chipmaker
Intel, which pressured the software giant to slap "Vista Capable"
stickers on PCs with Intel 915 chipsets, hardware that lacked the
firepower to run the full Vista feature set.
"Intel allegedly stood to lose "billions" of dollars if
Microsoft stuck to its original specs because the chipmaker would
have been stuck with a whole bunch of the Vista-inadequate 915s.
And while Microsoft's concern for Intel's quarterly earnings
results was touching in that corporate bottom-line kind of way, the
impact on consumers was less than heart-warming."
