Microsoft e-mails detail internal fight on 'Vista Capable'

want to handle," said Bob Aoki, a Microsoft general manager, in a message to Poole. "Frankly, Intel should have thought of this 3 years ago."

The most vehement opponent of the relaxed requirement was Jim Allchin, who was in overall charge of Vista's development and delivery. In a Feb. 1, 2006, e-mail to his boss, CEO Steve Ballmer, Allchin said, "I am beyond being upset here. This was totally mismanaged by Intel and Microsoft. What a mess. Now we have an upset partner, Microsoft destroyed credibility, as well as my own credibility shot."

That "upset partner" was HP, which went ballistic when it heard Intel's 915 chipset could be used in Vista Capable PCs. Contrary to some of its competitors, HP had spent millions on developing new motherboards to qualify its low-priced computers under the original rules of the program.

Others in the company sounded almost as upset, and seemed to argue that the decision should be reversed. "This kind of shit drives me crazy, Chris," said Mike Ybarra, a director of product management. "We have pushed the UI [user interface] in Vista so hard in the last 18 months, and we get our OEMs to go with higher end chip sets and graphics parts on existing PCs to really drive the experience for consumers, and at the last minute, we cave to Intel and give 915 and other chip sets a back door into the programs."

Mark Croft, the director of Windows marketing, weighed in as well. "If we give on these then the Logo does not 'mean' anything," he said. "I think that pulling out WDDM is a bad decision for customers."

The plaintiffs' motion quoted snippets of other e-mails that it argued represent more feedback inside Microsoft advocating a 180-degree turn. "Regarding the 915 -- I really wish we hadn't capitulated on this," read one message. "A 915 system will never every [sic] run Aero -- saying it is 'Vista Capable' when this means 'aero' is just disingenuous."

This is the second wave of insider e-mails that have been made public during the 17-month-old case. Last February, Pechman unsealed several hundred messages that, among other things, described the problems that some top Microsoft officials had with Vista shortly after it was released and -- as in the newest disclosures -- revealed serious disagreements by some over the program.

In the class-action lawsuit , which is now set to go to trial in April, the plaintiffs claim that Microsoft deceived customers by certifying PCs as able to run Vista when it allegedly knew the machines were able only to handle the stripped-down Vista Basic. That version lacked the new, heavily-promoted Aero interface.

Microsoft has denied the charges, arguing that it offered consumers different versions of Vista and clearly spelled out the requirements of each.