Vista Limits Choices,  Google Alleges
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Allegations by Google that Microsoft's new operating system unfairly disadvantages competitors has revived antitrust accusations against Microsoft and opened a front in a bitter war between the two technology giants.
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Bowing to pressure from Google and antitrust regulators, Microsoft will alter Windows Vista so users can pick a non-Microsoft program to search their hard drives.
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By Byron Acohido  SEATTLE -- There was a time when Microsoft would vigorously resist any court-imposed restrictions on Windows.    But the software giant has  agreed to a court order to make it easier for consumers to choose Google's popular desktop search on Windows Vista computers.
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Microsoft Corp. will change the program that helps Windows Vista users search their hard drives, in response to antitrust complaints from Google Inc., a person familiar with the issue said Tuesday.
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Microsoft Corp. defended its decision to limit support for three versions of the Windows Vista operating system to five years rather than the usual 10 years.
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By JESSICA MINTZ SEATTLE - Microsoft Corp. will change the program that helps Windows Vista users search their hard drives, in response to antitrust complaints from Google Inc., a person familiar with the issue said Tuesday.
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A white paper published this morning by hardware analysis firm iSuppli, based on its studies of Microsoft Windows Vista running on multiple grades of computer hardware, has concluded that the software publisher's stated minimum requirements for the system may not be nearly enough.
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In agreeing to make what could be described technically as a minor change to the way it handles its options for consumer desktop search, Microsoft last night may have made its most symbolically significant statement to date with regard to its current stance in the technology market: It backed down, in response to a complaint from Google that its placement of desktop search capabilities within Windows Vista constituted a breach of its antitrust settlement agreement with the US and states' governments regarding middleware.
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Restrictive hardware and convoluted rights management crimp consumer choices.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft officials deny that theÂ Department of Transportation's recent moratoriumÂ on adoption of Windows Vista is indicative of any widespread reluctance in the government sector to install the new operating system. In a report that was circulated internally within the department by DOT Chief Information Officer Daniel Mintz in late January 2007, that only surfaced publicly on March 5, the IT manager placed an indefinite halt on procurement of the software and any planned desktopÂ upgrades to Vista Among the reasons cited by Mintz in ceasing any deployment of the newest OS from Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft were questions about its compatibility with other programs, including earlier versions of Windows, and the estimated costs for moving to Vista. Despite the setback, Microsoft executives claim that Vista adoption is moving forward at a consistent pace in the government sector, and on par with similar installations among private industry. Although aware of the budgetary and scheduling conflicts that often cause the federal government to lag behind businesses in bringing onboard major new platforms, Microsoft contends that the OS is already finding a home in the space. "We're wrapping up the largest early adoption program for the windows OS ever, and over ten percent of our partners were from the federal government," said Patrick Svenburg, Windows client solution specialist with the Microsoft Federal group. "This also represented our largest partnership ever with the federal government; we worked closely with them throughout the entire development cycle to address their concerns and priorities." Svenburg said that Microsoft is planning to host senior officials from the Department of Transportation in Redmond before the end of March to address the concerns the department expects to encounter in moving to the OS. In his memo, Mintz specifically cited "lack of a compelling business case" as his rationale for temporarily banning the move to Vista, along with Microsoft Office 2007 and the Internet Explorer 7 browser. To be fair, Mintz and other DOT officials attributed some of the department's reluctance to upgrade on the agency's planned move to a new Washington headquarters later this year. The DOT technology executive didn't immediately respond to calls seeking further comment on the Vista moratorium. Microsoft representatives said that like many of its largest, Enterprise Agreement-level customers, government organizations such as the Transportation Department will need to avail themselves of the software maker's compatibility and deployment automation programs to help overcome some of the perceived challenges with Vista deployment. Some industry watchers believe, however, Â that it may still be hard for many federal agencies to make a sufficient business case for spending the time and money needed to move to the platform. Specifically, most of the major departments have invested heavily in moving their critical applications to Web-based systems, which could serve to dampen enthusiasm and demand for migration to the new OS and productivity suite, said Shawn McCarthy, a government IT analyst with IDC, based in Framingham, Mass. "A lot of government sites have been trying to migrate more applications to Web interfaces that any desktop system can access, and that's taken pressure off the organizations on the client side," McCarthy said. "The individual agencies are under a lot of pressure to make a business case anytime they want to do systems upgrades; if they can't really justify with benefit that will be seen, the upgrade either doesn't happen or migration is slower." The analyst said that despite Microsoft's claims that features such as improved security will convince government CIOs to get behind adoption of Vista, federal decision-makers will take a wait-and-see attitude toward the product and hold-off on moving over until the operating system's advantages are proven by others. Other experts said that it's too early to pass judgment on government or private-sector adoption of Vista since large organizations don't typically move to new technologies quickly. Michael Cherry, analyst with independent research firm Directions On Microsoft, based in Kirkland, Wash., said that the Transportation Department and other agencies will likely move to Vista incrementally over time. Organizations will also need to spend valuable time and money doing extensive evaluations of the OS before any installation begins, which could push back adoption further, he said. "When I read the [DOT] memo, I heard an IT department asking its people to refrain from buying ad hoc Vista licenses and machines, because they can't support that yet," said Cherry. "Something else to consider is that IT people have a lot of projects that they're already working and limited resources; Vista is not the kind of thing that merits dropping everything else to move on it quickly." Cherry said that he does believe federal agencies will begin adopting the OS at the same rate that they retire older desktop systems, although he noted that IT departments will likely give more consideration than ever before to alternatives including open source and Apple products. The first types of government users the analyst believes are likely to install Vista for functional reasons will be employees who carry sensitive data on their laptops, or view such information remotely on their PCs, he said. Those users will be seeking the onboard protection offered by the BitLocker encryption feature of Vista, according to the expert. In general he believes it's too soon for anyone to worry about adoption of the new OS. "It's way too soon to be taking individual cases or data points and trying to make a trend of them," Cherry said. "Vista might be good, but it's not so good people are going to dump their existing machines overnight just to get it."
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Reports that Google is planning a Mac version of its Desktop Search tool, recently released in beta for Windows, are not entirely accurate, according to publisher Tim O&#39;Reilly.
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Microsoft Corp.  has agreed to modify its Windows Vista operating system in response to a complaint that its computer search function put Google Inc.  and other potential rivals at a disadvantage, the Justice Department and Microsoft said on Tuesday.
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Internet search leader Google Inc. is trying to convince federal and state authorities that Microsoft Corp.'s Vista operating system is stifling competition as the high-tech heavyweights wrestle for the allegiance of personal computer users.
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InfoWorld - Microsoft will change how desktop search works in its Vista operating system by the end of the year, in response to an antitrust complaint by rival Google Inc., the company said in court documents released late Tuesday.
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A Croatian college student has created a utility that installs a seriously stripped-down Windows Vista, saying the heft of Microsoft's biggest desktop operating system is just too big to believe."Who can justify a 15GB operating system?" asked Dino Nuhagic, a fifth-year student from Split, a Croatian city on the Adriatic. Not Nuhagic, or the uncounted users who have turned to his creation, vLite.The free program lets users pick and choose which Vista components, hot fixes, drivers, and even language packs are installed, then builds a disk image that can be burned to a DVD for unattended installation of the operating system."Why did I do it? Well, it's performance and work environment," Nuhagic said when asked why he came up with vLite. "Performance, that's easy to explain. The less things running, the more responsive the OS. But the environment part is where it gets down to personal preference."Those preferences include options for leaving out virtually every component of Windows Vista, from the minor -- such as the bundled screensavers -- to the major, such as the firewall or Universal Plug and Play.Some vLite users, in fact, have made it a contest of sorts to come up with the puniest-possible installation package for the operating system. While Microsoft recommends that users set aside 15GB of hard-disk space to install its pride and joy, Nuhagic's fans boast of squeezing it into an image file as small as 515MB that takes up just 1.4GB on the hard drive.One user reported condensing Windows Vista Home Basic into a 526MB .iso file and installing it in a virtual machine that used just 1.3GB of drive space. "It worked well inside the virtual machine and since I have 1GB of RAM on the host I guess the little Vista would work well," said amocanu.Nuhagic didn't come right out and say it, but he hinted that he -- like more critical users and pundits -- thought Vista was bloated and could use some reducing. "To be frank, I don't need 90 percent of Windows. But that 10 percent, which guarantees that you can run [the] majority of games out there, is what is worth isolating."Crafting vLite wasn't easy, he said. But the time Nuhagic spent on its predecessor, nLite, which similarly squeezes Windows 2000 and Windows XP, paid off in spades. "Since I had four years of experience with tampering [with] older Windows, it was a lot easier than nLite," Nuhagic said of the development of vLite. "Also, it was easier than in XP because Vista does not have the old-style installation. It doesn't install components one by one, but simply extracts the image. Where XP would fail during install because a certain file was missing, that issue is not present in Vista."Even though vLite features a simple graphical interface that lets users remove a component with a click, Nuhagic warned that the utility isn't designed for the average user: "Because of certain possible compatibility issues with the programs out there [that] expect full Windows, I'd recommend [it] only to users [that] want exactly that kind of tool. In other words, I would not recommend it to someone who installs their OS once every few years. But if you do it every few months, then it's a must."Nuhagic couldn't say how many people use vLite, or even the number of times it's been downloaded from his Web site. "I don't have counters installed because the FTP mirrors were donated, and I would have to upgrade my hosting for some extra script processing," he said of his shoestring operation. It shouldn't be a surprise, however, that nLite, the Windows XP miniaturizer, remains four to five times more popular than vLite, based on the number of visitors to the different nLite and vLite Web sites.Microsoft knows of the tools -- Nuhagic said the company has contacted him in the past about possible employment -- but it's done little to quash the condensing. When asked whether it had any thoughts on vLite, a company spokeswoman e-mailed a lukewarm warning."Microsoft does not recommend using any tool to strip out applications from Windows Vista prior to installing it on your system, as it may affect your ability to download future Windows Updates and Service Packs, and may cause your system to become unstable," she said.But vLite's users praised Nuhagic's efforts with blunter language. "Thanks for spending your time making our OS less bloated," said one.VLite 1.1 can be downloaded from Nuhagic's Web site.
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Google is offering free software that lets users simultaneously search the Web and their personal computers for information. Analysts call the move a potential blow to rivals Microsoft and Yahoo in the race
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Microsoft yanks wish list of features for Vista's successor.