Mom Blasts Ballmer Over Kid's Vista Experience

Lucas123 writes "While on stage at a Gartner's ITxpo conference today, Ballmer got an ear-full from the mother of a 13-year-old girl who said after installing Vista on her daughter's computer she decided only two days later to switch back to XP because Vista was so difficult. Ballmer defended Vista saying: 'Your daughter saw a lot of value'; to which the mother replied: 'She's 13.' Ballmer said that Vista is bigger than XP, and 'for some people that's an issue, and it's not going to get smaller in any significant way in SP1. But machines are constantly getting bigger, and [it's] probably important to remember that as well.' Says the mother: 'Good, I'll let you come in and install it for me.'"

Comments

Translated for the Lay

[ackthpt]

"Let's start with the end user. Your daughter saw a lot of value," said Ballmer.

Translation: We spent a lot of money packing it with bloat.

"Users appreciate the value that we put into Vista," he said. But, as with earlier operating system releases, "there is always a tension between the value that end users see -- and frankly, that software developers see -- and the value that we can deliver to IT."

Translation: No matter how many versions we have, it's still one size fits all. The tension is generated because our developers don't lead normal lives and see things the way ordinary people do, which makes the end product obfuscated and confusing

"the most secure release of Windows you can humanly make," said Ballmer. "We have had better security, we have had fewer vulnerabilities, fewer issues with Windows Vista in its first six months than any OS that preceded it.

Translation: We're banking on bloat, the more there is the longer it takes the crackers to find the exploits, but sure as the Sun rises, they will find them because more code has more holes.

"I think there is a lot of value in Vista," he said.

Translation: Stock value. If we didn't come out with a new version of Windows everyone had to buy every few years our stock value would drop. We have to keep addicts supplied.

"When we initially shipped, fewer device drivers were ready for Vista than I would have liked, but we constantly worked with the device vendors to get new drivers available and implemented through our Windows update service," he said.

Translation: We rushed it to market. If we had waited until it was really ready we would have seen our stock drop. The premature release was purely driven by profit motives rather than care for our customers.

"We are in, from ... a corporate and enterprise side, an early adoption cycle," said Ballmer.

Translation: Revenue generating cycle - Bleeding edge, counting the casualties.

Or, better yet

[Rinisari]

Or, better yet, she can use an operating system that doesn't practically require new hardware for every new release, but operating system of which I speak can take advantage of new hardware when it's available, and that'll be sooner because she won't have to spend $400 on just the operating system.

Re:I hate to be the one defending Microsoft, but..

[Mattwolf7]

I love how every piece of software works with Vista except Microsoft's own programs...

I am a college student and needed to install MS Visual Studio for a project. Our CSE lab is partnered with MS through MSDN. We have access to most MS software. So I went online and noticed that Visual Studios 2003 Pro was on the website. (2005 is not available) Checked out the cd from the lab and went home to install it on Vista. After having trouble getting it to work I went searching for a fix.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/aa948854.aspx

Q: What products are supported?
A: We are supporting Visual Basic 6.0, Visual FoxPro 9.0 and Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 with the Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Update for Windows Vista.

So Visual Basic 6, created in 1998, is supported but software from 2003 isn't??

Re:Scary

[wodgy7]

I agree with you about the Vista brand being damaged in the minds of ordinary people. One anecdote: I'm in law school, and on Tuesday I noticed the girl sitting next to me had brought in a new MacBook Pro. I started chatting with her about it, and she told me the reason she had got it is because she needed a new laptop and didn't want to move to Vista. I've heard similar things (though not in such point-blank language) from other non-technical users. It's surprising to me. The word of mouth problems with Vista aren't just confined to OS bickering among nerds... there seems to be genuine negative buzz about Vista among ordinary, non-technical users. If you've ever run a business, word of mouth is the most powerful way to acquire or lose mindshare... no amount of advertising claiming "the WOW is now" will counter genuine, grassroots word of mouth. Will this have an impact on Microsoft? Probably not. But it's a sign that there are real limits to what users will put up with, even from a vendor with extraordinary market power.

Re:A lot of value...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly, the value she saw was equivalent to cakes, chocolates, and candy, and soon became sick of the sugar and just wanted same damn food.

Re:Am I reading that right?

[JamesP]

Actually, as the legend says, this was one of the turning points for MS, back the at the time when Lotus 1-2-3 reigned.

Back there, while Lotus was cramming everything to fit in 640k of memory, MS was making Excel w/o concerns for machines, and they got to ship earlier.

Than, by the time 1-2-3 shipped, modern machines were cheap enough, so people went with Excel instead

It really makes sense, in a way.

http://joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/09/18.html

Re:I hate to be the one defending Microsoft, but..

[Hymer]

"You upgrade your OS and you'll probably need to upgrade your hardware too." Correction: "You upgrade your Microsoft OS and you'll probably need to upgrade your hardware too."
Neither my Linux nor my OS X needed hardware upgrades.

--

hint: try to look outside the cube...

Re:Question for the geeks here...

[darkonc]

I'm of the opinion that much of the Vista-specific bloat comes from the DRM layer. Under the DRM paradigm, every driver doesn't just have to worry about doing their normal work -- it also has to worry about doing some, apparently innocuous, thing that pisses off some other random driver (or, eve, program) in the system. It also has to worry about whether it is required to get 'pissed off' by what some other random element is doing.
That constant looking-over-the-shoulder (both your own and others') has got to result in a lot of the lost performancethat is being seen in Vista.