--Jim Allchin, Microsoft

• William Poole of NComputing (Formerly Microsoft) Blamed in the Big Collusion
• Might Steve Ballmer be Deposed for Collusion After All?
• The Return of Vista Collusions: Will Ballmer be Deposed Soon?
• What We Can Learn About Novell from Intel-Microsoft-Dell-Hewlett-Packard Collusions

E-mails show Microsoft's internal reaction to Walt Mossberg column

[...]

"You also won’t have to worry about Vista if you buy one of Apple Computer’s Macintosh computers, which don’t run Windows," Mossberg wrote. "Every mainstream consumer doing typical tasks should consider the Mac. Its operating system, called Tiger, is better and much more secure than Windows XP, and already contains most of the key features promised for Vista."

What did Ballmer know and when did he know it?

That's arguably the biggest question in the Microsoft "Vista Capable" class-action lawsuit being heard by a federal judge in a Seattle court. Documents unsealed last Thursday imply that the Microsoft CEO was in on the decision two years ago to lower technical requirements for its Vista operating system as a favor to chipmaker Intel, which pressured the software giant to slap "Vista Capable" stickers on PCs with Intel 915 chipsets, hardware that lacked the firepower to run the full Vista feature set.

Intel allegedly stood to lose "billions" of dollars if Microsoft stuck to its original specs because the chipmaker would have been stuck with a whole bunch of the Vista-inadequate 915s. And while Microsoft's concern for Intel's quarterly earnings results was touching in that corporate bottom-line kind of way, the impact on consumers was less than heart-warming.