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.

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.