We do live in a litigious society, don’t we? And, frequently it seems, Microsoft is the target of the legal fraternity. Recently, Gordon Murray Tilden, a Seattle law firm, sued Microsoft on behalf of Dianne Kelley (the law firm is seeking to have the suit declared a class-action). The suit alleges "Microsoft engaged in bait and switch — assuring consumers they were purchasing 'Vista Capable' machines when, in fact, they could obtain only a stripped-down operating system lacking the functionality and features that Microsoft advertised as 'Vista.'"

The nub of the complaint is that many PCs marked as “Vista Capable” could only run Vista Home Basic, and not every edition of Vista.

<yawn>

If you’re in the business of specifying and purchasing software and operating systems (and the hardware to run them), you probably weren’t aware that there was a lawsuit lurking beneath the “product specification” documents that every vendor supplies, but evidently there is!

While it’s true that there are some vendors that will take the time to determine what it is you want to do with their software and create an accurate specification customized to your needs, that service comes at a high price. It also leads to that vendor creating a high bid in response to your request – not something that will earn him the business once the bean counters take a look. So the general trend – and it’s been going on for many, many years – is to estimate cost and need based on minimum requirements.

I’ve been running into those estimates from hardware and software vendors for at least 20 years (since the first time a hardware vendor told me that 512KB of RAM was sufficient to run a network server). But it isn’t just technology vendors that do this – so do the vendors of most consumer products: automobiles, cell phones, home builders, etc.

I’d thought that most reasonably intelligent people were aware of the, um, hyperbole that the marketing fraternity uses. And I’d thought you could sue if they actually lied. But in this case, Microsoft claimed the hardware was “Vista capable” and released a version of Vista that would run on it. To me, that meets the “I wasn’t lying” test.

IDG News Service spoke to Microsoft’s top lawyer last week who said he felt comfortable with Redmond’s marketing campaign. My personal opinion is that it might be a bit sleazy, but it’s no more so than campaigns I’ve seen and marketing materials I’ve faced from Oracle, Novell, Sun, HP/Compaq/DEC, and many others. There’s no need to defend the practice of trumpeting absolute minimum requirements, but there’s no call to enrich the lawyers, either.