News

Judge Denies Class Action Status in Vista Capable Suit

Microsoft got a favorable court ruling on Wednesday in an ongoing lawsuit against its past Vista Capable marketing practices. The judge in the case, Kelley et al. v. Microsoft, denied class-action status to the plaintiffs. However, the judge did not preclude individual plaintiffs from suing Microsoft in the matter.

Vista Capable is the name of a hardware certification and marketing campaign for new PCs. Under the Vista Capable program, consumers were assured by a sticker on new PCs that the machines were capable of running Windows Vista. However, some machines with the stickers were only capable of running the Vista Home Basic version of the operating system.

Advertised features of Windows Vista, such as the Aero graphics user interface, could not be run using Vista Home Basic. Microsoft claims the marketing was clear, but the plaintiffs sued.

In today's ruling, Judge Marsha Pechman of the U.S. District Court in Seattle told the plaintiffs that they had failed to prove "class-wide price inflation," according to a Seattle Times story.

The Seattle Times story described the challenge faced by the plaintiffs as follows:

"In certifying the case as a class action nearly a year ago, U.S. District Court Judge Marsha Pechman said the plaintiffs had to show the marketing program caused them to pay more for PCs only capable of running Vista Home Basic than they would have absent the Vista Capable campaign."

The ruling comes after internal Microsoft memos unearthed in the case suggested that Microsoft executives had qualms about public reactions to the Vista Capable marketing program.

In particular, Microsoft seems to have bent over backwards to appease Intel, which stood to lose money on graphics chips that were inadequate for running Vista's Aero graphics. Another memo suggested that Microsoft worked to accommodate Intel by dropping a key requirement of the Vista Capable program.

About the Author

Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

  • Compare New GitHub Copilot Free Plan for Visual Studio/VS Code to Paid Plans

    The free plan restricts the number of completions, chat requests and access to AI models, being suitable for occasional users and small projects.

  • Diving Deep into .NET MAUI

    Ever since someone figured out that fiddling bits results in source code, developers have sought one codebase for all types of apps on all platforms, with Microsoft's latest attempt to further that effort being .NET MAUI.

  • Copilot AI Boosts Abound in New VS Code v1.96

    Microsoft improved on its new "Copilot Edit" functionality in the latest release of Visual Studio Code, v1.96, its open-source based code editor that has become the most popular in the world according to many surveys.

  • AdaBoost Regression Using C#

    Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the AdaBoost.R2 algorithm for regression problems (where the goal is to predict a single numeric value). The implementation follows the original source research paper closely, so you can use it as a guide for customization for specific scenarios.

  • Versioning and Documenting ASP.NET Core Services

    Building an API with ASP.NET Core is only half the job. If your API is going to live more than one release cycle, you're going to need to version it. If you have other people building clients for it, you're going to need to document it.

Subscribe on YouTube