Michael Dolan Dot Com

Monday, February 20th, 2006

MSFT won’t allow unsigned drivers in Vista?

Tucked away in this eWeek article, I just noticed something subtle…

Microsoft could stop non-signed drivers from running on its operating systems, and is doing so with the 64-bit version of Windows Vista.

Windows “signed” drivers go through test from MSFT that last I checked also required the hardware vendor to pay a price to get the certification. I wonder if that has changed now… or will we be looking at a Mac type selection of hardware options for Windows in the future? Sure, signed drivers was a great idea, but with the limitless selection of peripherals and the thought of none of them working with Vista… have to wonder..

I do have to feel sorry for MSFT on this Windows Media player business. (yikes… temperature steady, hell hasn’t frozen yet)..

Every OS out there (including Linux distros) ship with a media player – sure those who read my posts can probably all swap them out with portage/Gentoo with little fuss, but the average user… they are not going to just think up – “Hey I’ll download the free Real Player today instead of Windows Media Player”.

Now they have 8 Vista editions (2 of them for the no-Media player versions) – how dumb is that… I mean why 6 versions in the first place, but 2 are specifically for the EU with no media player.

You’d guess the solution around the anti-trust problems would be to make it easy for users to select which media player they want (assuming they even know the difference) – but I guess that wasn’t an option. You know who pays the price?? The “tech support” person in the family of the user who just bought a media playerless version of Windows and now has no clue how to play an MP3.