Using Windows Update to find class action plaintiffs

Well this is interesting. A lawyer friend of mine sent me an excerpt from the Beard Group's Class Action Reporter newsletter (subscription required) about the "Windows Vista Capable" lawsuit.

You may have heard of it - in February this year a Washington court granted class action status to a suit brought against Microsoft for "unjust enrichment" by labelling PCs as "Windows Vista Capable" which no reasonable person could bear to run Vista on.

Since then, Microsoft has "repeatedly said it cannot identify the people who bought PCs under its Vista Capable marketing campaign in 2006 and early 2007". The cunning lawyers, however, have suggested that Microsoft deploy a script via Windows Update which could identify relevant PCs and alert the user of their eligibility to join the class action suit.

Genius! The Microsoft lawyers must be absolutely livid. A hired "expert" has suggested that it would take Microsoft no more than a few hours to develop and QA the update. I think that is on the low side, but there's certainly not more than a few days work in it -- which is still peanuts in the context of the case.

One wonders what the update would do, and who would collect the data. Make the dialog incomprehesive enough and noone will be able to join the case :) Unless, of course, they own a copy of Dealing with Windows Dialog Boxes - for Dummies.