Ballmer Says Microsoft Wasted Time On Vista

Stoobalou writes "In a chat with fellow CEOs at Microsoft's 14th annual CEO Summit, Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer came close to admitting Vista was a dog. 'How do you get your product right? How do you help the customer? How do you be patient?' he asked, as if he knew the answer. What he did know was that Microsoft spent too many years building Windows Vista. 'We tried too big a task and in the process wound up losing thousands of man hours of innovation,' he said." You can also watch video of the speech, but 31 minutes of Ballmer is a lot of Ballmer.

Comments

Re:Microsoft is still way behind

[Enderandrew]

Supposedly they designed Windows 7 with tablets in mind and added multi-touch support. However the only company I know that was working on a Windows 7 tablet (HP) has since dropped Windows 7, and instead bought out Palm so they could get WebOS.

Re:Microsoft is still way behind

[alen]

how big was the footprint? even if they got it down to 5GB - 10GB it's still too much when iphone OS is 500MB or less and does most things people want in a tablet

short memories

[confused one]

For those who've forgotten, the project that resulted in the Vista release was reset at least once. Remember Longhorn? From Wikipedia :

Faced with ongoing delays and concerns about feature creep, Microsoft announced on August 27, 2004 that it was making significant changes. "Longhorn" development basically started afresh, building on the Windows Server 2003 codebase, and re-incorporating only the features that would be intended for an actual operating system release.

Re:I'd contend that they wasted everyone's time on

[Anonymous Coward]

it's NOT any more secure than XP

Umm, yes it is. (lol slashbots, +5 mod to an obvious untruth just because it bashes MS ...)

UAC, bitlocker / EFS, IE protected mode, enhanced firewall management, ASLR enabled (plus I think they improved it in win7) and Windows Defender installed by default, kernel patch protection, network access protection. Furthermore MS has for some time been carrying out more thorough code review, reducing "attack surface" e.g. removing unnecessary default services and sending coders on secure programming training.

Is it "secure"? Not really, but that's mostly the fault of end users running botnet.exe and ignoring UAC these days. Even in that regard they're trying to do something, Microsoft Security Essentials is free and a pretty good AV by all accounts.

Re:I'd contend that they wasted everyone's time on

[Anonymous Coward]

It is much more secure than xp.
UAC, which allows old application, requiring admin rights under xp, to run under user's account. Firewall, which now can filter outbound connections and offers better configuration capabilities. Protected mode for ie, which mitigates most exploits. Holes in ie are really exploitable only on windows xp.
Address space randomization. SEH is now secure, under xp it was possible to change exception handler's address (if the application itself had an exploitable buffer overflow, of course) and use it to execute code.
Automatic detection of stack overflow, which works in most cases. Driver signing (mandatory on 64 bits), life is much harder for rootkits now. Also PatchGuard, which prevents modification of code in ring0 space.
DNSSEC support.
Session 0 isolation, which mitigates most of the shatter attacks.
Crucial system's binaries are checksumed at startup.
Many more drivers are user space now, this makes the attack vector size smaller. Things like ring0 access via unsecure printer's driver aren't possible now.
Password's hash method was changed from md5 to sha256.
Most of there are present in vista, if not all.
And thats just from my memory. You are obviously horribly ignorant and clueless.