Microsoft pipped in Beijing Olympic race?

Some confusion this week about whether the organisers of the Beijing Olympics had taken a swipe at Microsoft, or not.

Reports surfaced in the past couple of days that Lenovo, an official supplier to the Beijing Olympics, was to ship the majority of its computers to the games with XP, rather than Vista, installed.

This - the chairman of Lenovo, Yang Yuanqing, suggested, in remarks that were taken slightly out of context - was because the Olympics needed stable technologies and "if it's not stable, it could have some problems."

Implication: Vista was unstable.

Cue a series of rather unflattering (for Microsoft) headlines, including 'Unstable Vista Dumped for Olympics', 'Windows Vista Snubbed by Olympics organisers', 'Vista loses Olympics race', and, perhaps the most inspired, '2008 Olympics to run on XP'.

When contacted about the story, Lenovo confirmed that the 800 laptops, 700 servers, 12,000 desktop PCs and 2,000 printers which it had sent to the International Olympic Committee did, indeed, run XP. (The 5,000 machines that will be dotted around lounges for use by athletes and officials will run Vista.)

But it rinsed its hands of the decision: "The operating system for the computers, as a software issue, was determined by the Beijing Organising Committtee (BOCOG), rather than Lenovo."

Over to BOCOG, who replied - within 15 minutes of a request - that the decision to go with XP had been made last year, long before Vista was released. "The reason is that a lot of software needs to be developed for the Games, so BOCOG had to make the decision on the operating system early," a spokeswoman said.

"It's quite usual that an Organising Committee makes a decision on the operating system two years out (from the Games)."

So: Beijing acquitted of Microsoft smear, and Vista found not to have 'lost Olympics race', given it wasn't even a starter when it was run.

Comments

[Desmond]

I am not surprised at this decision, as it would appear to be sensible one, because Microsoft Vista is without a doubt, quite unstable and unreliable. As a result of these inherent problems, I have reverted all my computers to run using the Windows XP operating system.