Another one of those Vista Capable Lawsuit e-mails just came to light. And this one is good! According to this article from CRN, long before Intel pressured Microsoft into helping it to dump low end chipsets, Microsoft itself came up with “Vista Capable” at the urging of Best Buy. According to the article, Vista marketing director Rajesh Srinivasan and others devised the now infamous two-tiered Vista Ready/Vista Capable plan- the latter category known to be incapable of handling the ultra cool Vista Aero visual interface because of crappy Intel integrated graphics support-in the summer of 2005. Srinivasan pitched the idea to Best Buy as early as August 2005, and Best Buy was apparently cool with it.
So, everybody’s blaming Intel, but it looks like Microsoft did itself in all by itself. Stay tuned, there’s likely to be more revelations as more e-mails come to light.