Microsoft, Testing Firm Bicker Over Benchmark

December 10, 2007 (Computerworld) -- Microsoft Corp. and a performance testing firm are trading barbs over the latter’s claims that an upcoming update of Windows XP ran through a series of Office benchmarks about twice as fast as an early version of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 did. Nick White, a Vista program manager at Microsoft, bashed the benchmarking by Devil Mountain Software Inc. in a blog posting, saying that the performance of the updates is still “a moving target” and that publishing the benchmark results now isn’t “a worthwhile exercise.” But Craig Barth, Devil Mountain’s chief technology officer, said the versions of the Vista and XP updates that his firm benchmarked were “fair game” for testing. “We don’t have an agenda,” he said. “We’re just trying to get the information out there.”

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