Aug. 9, 2005
The birth of the Vista Capable campaign may be seen in a long e-mail from Rajesh Srinivasan to Shanen Boettcher, whom Srinivasan credits with conceiving the 'two tier approach.' 'Best Buy validated your two tier approach,' Srinivasan writes, explaining that 'it makes sense now' to 'have a two tier program where lower tier is "Capable", higher tier is "Ready or Optimized". (pgs. 134-5)
In Srinivasan's vision, WVDDM (later shortened to WDDM) capability would not be necessary to stamp a system 'Capable'. It would be five to six more months before Microsoft officially dropped its WDDM requirement from the Vista Capable logo campaign. But the seeds had been laid for putting the Vista logo on PCs that couldn't even run the Vista-defining Aero GUI.
Ultimately, the appeal of the Srinivasan-Boettcher two-tier Vista logo program, per Best Buy, was that it 'addresses 100% of PCs'. That meant that the Vista brand could be associated with the '70-80% of PCs' that Srinivasan estimated would lack the hardware to run the full version of the operating system at the launch of the Vista Capable campaign in 'early Spring 06'.
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