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.

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: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.