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Ballmer Calls Vista 'A Work In Progress'
shanen tips us to a Seattle Post-Intelligencer story about comments from Steve Ballmer at a conference earlier this week during which he referred to Vista as "a work in progress." He also admitted that the 5-year release cycle wasn't a good idea. Despite the approaching deadline for the end of XP sales, Ballmer's remarks about the older operating system were more ambiguous: "Vista is bigger than XP. It's going to stay bigger than XP. We have to make sure it doesn't get bigger still, and that the performance and that the battery life and that the compatibility, we're driving on the things that we need to drive hard to improve. I know we're going to continue to get feedback from people on how long XP should be available. We've got some opinions on that, we've expressed our views. ... I'm always interested in hearing from you on these and other issues."
Also, maybe you shouldn't release a work in progress.
It is a failure. Why not just name the child by its real name?
The problem being your description of the phrase "it just works" as "mythical" is correct. Even with a limited number of hardware targets to run OS X on (and a relatively small software universe), Apple still can't get upgrades not to screw up on a regular basis.
The real problem, to correct a poster a few P's above is:
"If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy all of civilization"(Weinburg's second law).
Despite all of the truly gifted programmers, the wonderful development tools and several decades of experience, computers still aren't toasters (except Pentium IV's of course).
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Ballmer is right -- it shouldn't be a five-year release cycle. It should be 10 years. 64-bit is a good reason to have a new release after NT 4.0.
You know, Vista may be a work in progress, but Balmer's leadership of the company has most definitely stalled. Microsoft's reputation in the PC marketplace is anything but positive (i.e. neutral at best). They (and their software) are only big and popular (read: ubiquitous) due to inertia and lock-in. It's time for the tech community to just move on - completely ignore MS, deal with their s/w as needed, and replace it with "futureware" when it makes sense. Really. The "deadhorse" tag most certainly applies to this OS. Stop paying attention to anything Balmer blurts out of (any of) his orifices. He's prolly some of the most dead weight at that company anyways.
Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati
-Possum Lodge Motto
There's also a difference between something that is given away for free being called a work in progress and something that is a pricey commercial product being called a work in progress. Of course, you're right about feedback and improvement. This seems more about a poor choice of words by Ballmer.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
I wouldn't be so sure. Linux is something that's more ambiguous than Windows is - Windows is a packaged, supposedly complete product that costs real money (a lot of it), is extremely widespread, and most importantly to your point, used by almost everyone in North America at some point in their lives - Which, in essence, means that Ma, Pa and Uncle Tusky are alpha/beta testers. And they're paying for it.
Linux is at its core a community effort, rather than a commercial product (though many have been made from it). As such, it is constantly changing and evolving, and is quite difficult to "keep up" with for most who aren't enthusiasts (Windows version upgrades gives most people a hard time to begin with). There exist shiny, polished distros like Ubuntu and Fedora that are meant to be a "whole product", being almost literally a snapshot of stable, tested software bundled with a stable version of the kernel, but these OSes are generally non-profit or free (as in both these cases).
The core difference between them at first glance is that Windows costs money. Coupled with what Ballmer went on record with in TA, that basically means that Microsoft doesn't consider Vista a "complete" product as yet, but has no problem charging inordinate amounts of money for the privilege of running it. That said, my experiences with Ubuntu in the past have always been a lot more polished than my experiences in Windows, and I would consider Windows to be an inferior product on most days. I still use Windows XP (my X-Fi doesn't yet have a driver for Ubuntu and Wine still isn't perfect), but I doubt I'll be making a jump to Vista "Just Because". There don't seem to be any compelling reasons to make the change (aside from having Aero and DX10 support, the latter of which won't run on my system and the former of which is a memory hog for a decrease in desktop CPU usage), and a lot of people feel the same way - Even Joe and Jane Average.
Another difference between Windows and Linux is that while the Linux kernel itself may be in perpetual development (as is the general mindset of Linux), this is because it falls under a different development model than the Microsoft mindset. Linux' greatest trait is that it IS in perpetual development - Because this is desired and necessary. For Microsoft, it's supposed to be one spit-shined, heavily-tested operating system every few years. A different model; Not necessarily better or worse, but different, more similar to Mac OS and most traditional software development cycles. In this model, however, being in a state of perpetual development is something that is absolutely catastrophic, because as with the XP->Vista jump, more development time is spent fixing holes and bugs in the previous generation of software to bring it up to spec than is spent working on the next big release. This is what we're looking at with Vista, which Ballmer confirmed.
The very fact that most of the more impressive features of Windows Vista (hi, WinFS!) were ripped from it later on in its development stunted its ability to really compete against even its own predecessor, and for me, cast doubt upon its legitimacy as a valid entry in the product line.
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
Your products suck. They threaten people's hardware, waste their time, cost them too much both in dollars and in lost productivity. They have created a far too large an infrastructure of people who could be made more productive elsewhere (MCSE and the like = Amway pyramid schemes). Furthermore they pollute useful infrastructure used by non-Microsoft solutions by serving as a growth medium for malware and by causing millions of Windows users who can't rid themselves of your products to run helplessly to those who have for help. Ultimately as with any widespread systemic defect, your products cost lives.
Please go to hell. And take Windows with you.
Thanks for listening.
If Linus made this statement about Linux, it would be within the context of operating systems whose kernels and other low level components have an established history of successful upgrades with minimal negative impacts on userland. However I doubt that Linus would ever make this statement since he rarely casts glittering generalities before the public.
But the statement was made by Ballmer, and needs to be evaluated within the context of Microsoft's history of software releases. Within that context, the statement is clearly a piece of spin doctor legerdemain to cover the damage that Vista does to the userland experiences of those unfortunates who have had Vista inflicted upon them.
I suggest that author of PP sell off his MSFT stock and invest in something with a better future, like maybe a recycling and disposal company. It should be obvious to everyone with a brain that when a stockholder has to take up fanboi behaviors to protect his investment, there is something wrong with that stock.
There are reasons the earlier versions of Vista sucked, and like Balmer said, are still work in progress. To summarise the three main points I see:
-Actual security (UAC); breaking a shed-load of applications that would write to C:\Windows and think nothing of it
-64 bit. It's the first serious consumer Windows that's 64 bit. XP 64 bit is rare at best; Win2003 isn't for consumers.
-New driver architecture. Video, audio, and network driver stack has been re-written from the ground up after nearly 10 years to being more or less the same. New changes are worthwhile too; a bad video driver should (in theory) never be able to bring a system crashing down like in XP, for instance.
All these things had to be done; all these things broke stuff. They are massive and necessary changes, and in the long run will pay off, but in the short run have been a bit of a system-shock.
Things are changing though; but Vista has been as much a change from XP under the hood as 98 -> 2000 migration was in my opinion.
throw new NoSignatureException();
You've got a point. A point that Microsoft should really be considering. If you can't get past Alpha quality in six years (people like to talk about Visata's five-year cycle, but six years later, we're at SP1 and it's still not ready), then you need to consider some options:
Like a lot of us here, I'm the "techie guy" who helps everyone with their computer problems. Most of these people are clueless and just nod their heads with blank stares when I try and explain what the problem was and how I fixed it. But now, even these Average Folks are talking about how bad Vista sucks, how they feel burned by buying a PC with it pre-installed, and wanting to know how can they get "real Windows" back.
Fortunately, I've made more Linux converts over the past year than I had in the previous five combined.
:q!
I can sympathize with the drawn out development cycle. Whenever this has happened at places that I've worked, it gets impossible to keep up with the changes. Scope creeps, because what you developed last year is no longer relevant. Plus, there's something that simply *has* to go into this upcoming release because everyone knows its going to take a while and you have told a customer they can have it. If you don't know when the current release is going out, slating anything for the next one is pretty much saying it'll never get done. These kinds of things just don't stop coming up.
The landscape changed a lot between when MS started Vista and when they released it. They were behind the times, trying to play catch-up, and they botched it. I had high hopes for Vista when they were planning it...new file system, powershell, lots of unfulfilled promises. They ended up delivering something that is passing fare IMO but is behind the times, and I don't see them changing the tune with their next release. They are wed to this beast now.
And Ubuntu is still a pain in the ass to get working on a good many laptops. Now, that's not entirely the fault of the open source community, as a lot of hardware vendors won't or can't deal with Linux, and force developers to either do hacks like ndiswrapper or reverse engineer Windows drivers. But the fact remains that laptops remain a huge problem for Ubuntu, and for all Linux distros.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
According to this basic analysis(pdf), debian Etch is an order of magnitude larger and more complex than Vista. And yet it doesn't require this "new hardware" you're speaking of.
In fact in addition to the x86-32 and x86-64 targets Vista aims for it also runs on alpha, sparc, arm, powerpc, hppa, ia64, mips and s390. From the toys to spacecraft, from webservers to 85.2% of the world's top 500 supercomputers it'll run on almost anything. That's engineering.
You have been able to buy PCs preloaded with linux from Walmart, Dell, IBM, HP and many others for several years.
So switch. It's time. Ballmer says Vista is a work in progress. Gates says its replacement is a year out. Let's take their word for it. This is a great window of opportunity to justify looking at alternatives.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
There was a night and day architectural difference between Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X though, and it was worth suffering through the transition to get to the end-point of an infinitely better designed core OS. The underpinnings of XP and Vista are still essentially the same and still fundamentally flawed.
If Microsoft is going to make its users go through that sort of transition, it would have been far better to make a completely fresh start on a better foundation with a compatibility layer for older software, just as Apple did.
It's a Unix system - I know this.
Again with the excuses about 'multiiple hardware configurations that Apple doesn't have to worry about'.
Microsoft does operate a Winlogo program. You know, the 'Certified for Windows Vista' stickers you see on every box at Best Buy and Newegg? If Microsoft isn't operating that with the same 'iron fist' that Apple is, would you say that the Winlogo program is nothing but a marketing scheme to spread the Windows logo on every box in the store?
And enough with the 'wait until SP2' or 'this happened with XP too' excuses. XP came 2 years after Windows 2000. Vista has been in development more than twice that amount of time.
Microsoft told us time and time again that Vista would be released "when it was 100% finished, not before". The the reason it was so late was that they wanted it to be perfect, etc., etc.
It was pretty obvious that in the end they rushed it out for Xmas when it really needed another six months/year.
No sig today...
Except that Ma Bell wrote a better OS.