When did the guys from Delta House start running Microsoft?

"Fat, dumb, and stupid is no way to go through life, son."

These immortal words, uttered by Dean Wormer in the classic Animal House, could be applied collectively to many companies today. Many come to mind, the most obvious is Microsoft, where last year in the rush to get a new product launched, it wasn't so much 'fat, dumb and stupid' so much as 'hubris, avarice, and... okay, stupidity'. It isn’t often easy to distinguish between those three. Too often, all are a part of a lousy decision, and the launch of Vista illustrates all three.

Twelve months following the launch of the Vista operating system there remains a significant reluctance among consumers and enterprises to ‘upgrade’ to the new operating system. Heads in the sand, Redmond executives are quick to suggest that price alone is a deterrent to sales. Yet anyone who knows anyone who has used the operating system likely knows one or more of the dozens of horror stories associated with Vista. In short, the stories caught fire and the Vista brand now precedes itself. No amount of new pricing strategies will change that.

In recent court documents stemming from a class action lawsuit, it is discovered that even Microsoft’s own executives were victims of Vista, either through a lack of drivers for peripherals, certification of underpowered hardware, or a host of other issues common to all Vista users… the executive types from Redmond voiced their frustrations in revealing internal emails obtained by the court.

The reason for the failure of Vista is, as stated above, actually three-fold: hubris, avarice, and stupidity. According to a recent article in the New York Times, all three were in play in Redmond at the time before, during and after the launch.
Hubris:
In the run-up to launch, Microsoft lowered the requirements for hardware, changing required wording on the ubiquitous sticker from “Vista Ready” to “Vista Capable”. (The latter is actually on the notebook on which this is being typed. I run XP, as after having deloused a neighbor’s Vista machine, I elected to stay with what I know).

Avarice:
Internal documents obtained through the legal action reveal that the decision to dumb-down the hardware specifications faces even internal protest in Redmond, including, according to the Times article, Anantha Kancherla, who as a Microsoft program manager was in a position to know that the configuration was so minimal that “even a piece of junk will qualify.”

Stupidity:
Anticipating customer revolt after the hardware requirements were compromised, Microsoft’s own staff prepared for the certain complaints in internal discussions, including a comment from a Microsoft sales manager who wisely – and obviously – wrote, “It would be a lot less costly to do the right thing for the customer now, than to spend dollars on the back end trying to fix the problem.”

It’s too late for Vista, and my humble prediction is that it will go away and undergo a retooling - perhaps a later integration of key features into a different OS release. (There is precedent for a failed OS... anyone running ‘Windows Me’? Didn’t think so.) As for Microsoft, to borrow another Animal House reference, they are now on "double secret probation" with the marketplace. Microsoft needs to be schooled in the threat posed by its competitors – not the least of which include Google, and of course, open source. The days when consumers would accept whatever Redmond dished out are past . Vista is just a symptom of the whole of the Microsoft brand.

To paraphrase Deam Wormer, “Hubris, avarice, and stupidity are no way to run a company, son.”