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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.
"We tried too big a task and in the process wound up losing thousands of man hours of innovation,"
Boy that word sure doesn't mean jackshit when it just gets thrown around and abused like that, huh? Like watching the word 'fuck' get detoothed in Scorsese's Goodfellas, there's this sort of desensitization toward 'innovation' that leaves me confused as to how I should describe people like Tesla, Turing and Shannon. If Ballmer considers all of his workers as 'innovators' and has "thousands of man hours of innovation" at his disposal then surely there must be some new word to apply to the real innovators. I guess there might be something to the theory that innovation diffuses with time but this is downright ridiculous.
Innovation requires risk and not the kind of risks Microsoft took with their Vista debacle. It requires that you do things entirely differently than everyone else. This is not Microsoft. This is not Windows Vista nor Windows 7 nor IE anything.
My work here is dung.
To be fair though, Vista laid the groundwork for Windows 7, which I have (almost) nothing but praise for...so maybe it was worth it. Besides, just like XP, as Vista got on in age it became much better.
Unlike XP, people won't be using it 9 years after its release...
Living With a Nerd
windows 7 is nice, but the cool things now are cell phones and tablets. for that you need a mobile OS with a footprint of under 1GB. Windows Phone 7 is still months away and a few years behind iPhone OS and Android.
And they only sort of cleaned things up with 7. Keep solidly in mind that 7 is nothing more than what Vista probably ought to have shipped with in the first place. Keep solidly in mind that it's NOT any more secure than XP (if you tell yourself that it is, keep deluding yourself...helps all the botnets...). If Ballmer was honestly interested in "innovation", he should have risked quite a bit more than he did with Vista- for all the issues, etc. they had, they could have gotten further along by taking a *BSD or Linux core and slapping a WINE-like application layer composed of the app framework that everyone calls "Windows" and would have gotten further and better as a result. Strangely, I think it'd taken less time than Vista took as well- but that's just a personal observation, and nothing more...
Innovation requires risk and not the kind of risks Microsoft took with their Vista debacle. It requires that you do things entirely differently than everyone else. This is not Microsoft. This is not Windows Vista nor Windows 7 nor IE anything.
Microsoft took a big risk with Longhorn and tried to write pretty much the whole OS in managed code (entirely different to everyone else) and it didn't pay off. Most of the delay came from throwing most of that work away and starting again back in native code.
We tried too big a task and in the process wound up losing thousands of man hours of innovation
You wasted thousands of man-hours of innovation, but not for the reasons you think. You run a company with a long history and well-known culture of quashing real innovation (because, let's all be honest, Microsoft is big enough with enough smart people working there that real good ideas do see development - they just never seem to see release...). The development teams are so political (with the Office team at the top of the heap, as I understand it) resulting in corporate politics determining what ideas actually make it to market rather than the merits of the actual idea. How many innovative ideas have been canned by internal policy and infighting?
Vista was a dog but let's not blame Vista for lost man-hours of innovation - look at your corporate culture and you'll find the problem.
What everyone else knew in minutes
To be fair though, Vista laid the groundwork for Windows 7
There were a lot of jokes about Vista being a beta for Windows 7. It turns out that Vista inadvertently filled that role. Windows 7 is much better for having Vista taken the beating it did.
It's amazing how programmed the top brass at Microsoft are to including this word "innovation" in every speech. I've hardly heard a pronouncement over the last ten years, particularly from Ballmer, and before him Bill Gates, that doesn't feature this word prominently.
I think it all kicked off when they were being hauled over the coals by the EU and threatened with anti-trust action in the US. They then decided that they had to give a better image of actually doing something worthwhile.
Of course, as you note, they are (given their R&D resources) about the most un-innovative company you could imagine.
Ok.. that sure was a "waste of time" but microsoft DID get huge loads of money from people buying the SAME software twice!
For lame windows users that was a waste of their money indeed!
Vista's failure was because Microsoft had no idea what it wanted Vista to be.
I disagree. They knew exactly what they wanted Vista to be: Longhorn. They just couldn't pull it off, so we got Vista instead.
I dont think Windows 7 is any better than Windows Vista. Marginally faster compared to Vista but being faster than Vista is like winning special olympics, youre still a retard.
Microsoft has no connection whatsoever with their users and thats where their real problem lies. Their users wants their OS to run their applications as good as possible and make managing the computer easy. Microsoft wants the OS to be the users primary application. Jumping up and down in your users face screaming for attention when their primary goal is using their apps arent productive.
Until Microsofts leadership realizes their customers are their end users Windows will continue to suck as bad as ever.
HTTP/1.1 400
I refuse to install moonlight to watch Ballmer.
I'm not sure I'd classify 2k as the beta for xp. 2000 was definitely the successor to NT 4, and the last version with a distinct workstation variant. I remember being delighted with 2000 server in comparison to NT 4.
Windows ME fills the XP beta position, though. Nearly everyone hated it. It was released after 2000... kind of like how 98 was released after NT 4, which was released after 95. The big difference I see, though, is that it was not NT based. Anyway, people complained about XP for quite a while, too. Not as badly as Vista or ME, though.
Through all the marketing hype around Vista, you heard the voice of the few reviewers that MS forgot to buy: Vista? Why bother?
Vista was, next to Win95, the maybe most hyped OS ever. Even Apple, in all its ability to hype and market their products, could not hold a candle to the amount of time and money pumped into advertising Vista. But while the hype of Win95 came from the users, from people who never used or owned a computer but still just "had to have it", and where Apple manages to motivate its die hard users to work as their mouthpiece, Vista's hype was a lonely cry from MS alone. Partly, of course, this is due to MS being held in fairly low esteem by geeks around the globe (compared to Apple, who do have a fair amount of fans in the geek community, especially the very outspoken geek community, who fill blogs and review pages with their experience and joy they have from their latest Apple tool), but mostly it is simply due to Vista not performing well.
First, it did not offer anything really genuinely "new". There was no "wow, look at that! Never seen that before!" part of Vista. Every piece of Apple hard- or software so far always came with something "new". Some trick, some gadget, or maybe just some neat toy that was something to talk about in your review. Even if you never used it again after the novelty factor wore off. But it was something you could talk about. Something you could write about. Something you could review and say "hey, they invented something again". No such thing for Vista. You could basically just say "Well... it looks different ... and some of the menues are different ... oh, and hey, you can now simply search for your program instead of having to look for it in the program manag... oh, wait, no, Apple did that first... Umm.. yeah, but it's new on Windows!"
That doesn't pull people in. That's not attractive. And neither is offering the only eye candy feature (i.e. Aero) only to the upper price segments. Eye candy is what could have convinced Joe Randomuser, but he WILL NOT buy an "Enterprise" or "ultimate" edition! Talking about segmented systems, how many were there? 10 different versions? More? I don't remember, to be honest, but how should anyone but the most interested enthusiast know what version he needs? People, there's a reason why a car manufacturer only offers a handful of models per year and some extras to tack on (just to get a car analogy into the diatribe here). Because people do not want to spend hours trying to figure out what version they wanna buy! It's nice of MS to offer its users that choice, but the users don't even WANT that many choices. Even most Linux distros noticed that by now and offer a standard package that fits most users who don't want to bother sifting through the hundreds of options. Take a standard package, tack a few things you might want additionally to it and off you go!
Vista was more a marketing blunder than a "bad" OS. Ok, granted, it wasn't the best OS or the most "expected" OS MS ever built. No, it was not the worst, that spot is still occupied by ME. If MS should learn anything from Vista, then that it's not enough to pump a few million bucks into the PR and marketing machine to make people want an OS.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I was just about to reply with the same comment. There were clear goals expounded throughout almost a decade of vaporware announcements of NT, Chicago, and then Longhorn. The problem was that they couldn't get most of it to work properly, while the landscape of real innovation kept changing around them. To "adapt", they kept adding more and more items to their extensive promised features list, and it all came crumbling down eventually when they realized that six years have gone by from their last major release and the world was not holding its breath anymore.
Then Vista was put together by salvaging some parts and adding some shiny chrome, just to fill up the gaping void in their product line. No wonder it seems inconsistent and lacking of a coherent vision or direction--it barely had any of either.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
So how do reconcile such nuttery with the fact that drm-free mp3s and programs like VLC work just fine on Windows 7?
It doesn't seem all that draconian.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
as opposed to "magical", "revolutionary", "great", "awesome", "phenomenal", etc...?
But it was Windows - remember when everyone thought it was just a fad?
.
Since when has Microsoft started to innovate? Outside of innovation in pushing the legalities of leveraging its monopoly, that is.
Everytime I read Ballmer talking about Microsoft innovation, I come away with the opinion that he is trying more to convince himself that Microsoft actually innovates (it doesn't), than he is trying to convince others.
Microsoft wasted time on Vista and Ballmer. The fact that Apple's market cap is so close to Microsoft's now is the ultimate embarrassment. Shareholders shouldn't be happy about the lack of "innovation" through his tenure.
And it affects us all. Even if you don't own MSFT directly, you probably have skin in the game through your 401-k, mutual funds, etc.
He's like that nasty fart in an elevator that you really, truly want to get away from but just can't. Shareholders need to pry the door open and let in some fresh air.
Actually, having actually used Win2K back in the day, it wasn't half bad if you put it into perspective. Win2K wasn't an upgrade to Windows 98. WinME was the upgrade to Windows 98. Win2K was the upgrade to Win NT 4.0.
And, really, I can't think of many things that worked worse in Win2k than on NT, other than the fact that Win2K needed more RAM. And speaking of devices and drivers, it was compatible with almost everything that used to work under NT (though not with anything that used to only work in the DOS part of '98), and it added support for USB that NT lacked completely until a much later patch, it added DirectX support, etc. Heck, it could even make a C: partition that's larger than 4GB, unlike the NT installer. (Note though: NT could install on a larger NTFS partition, if you formatted and partitioned the drive on another computer, it just couldn't make a new C: partition itself that was larger than 4GB.)
All things considered, for the actual product line it was a part of, i.e., as an upgrade to NT not to '98, I'd say Win2K was actually a huge step forward.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Really? In my personal experience on numerous machines Windows 2000 was the most stable, least crashing version of Windows excepting possibly XP SP2. The jury is still out on 7 in my experience, but it is hugely better than Vista and I've had few problems. While I agree that Win2K had a lot of missing drivers on day 1, that got fixed rapidly and was really the only major problem with 2K whereas missing drivers were only one of Vista's myriad problems. The primary reason that XP was better "out of the gate" was that most (if not all) of the drivers for 2K worked on XP, XP being NT 5.1 and 2000 being NT 5.0.
So from a codebase/versioning perspective I see your point, but in terms of quality and usability I think Vista is more accurately compared to Me.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
I think you're being harsh. I'm hardly a Microsoft fanboi. If anything the more typical charge against me would be Apple fanboi, but I own computers with MacOS, Windows 7, and Ubuntu as their primary OS; and use all three pretty extensively.
UAC is still annoying to the point that I disable it completely.
It's much improved over Vista ("You have moved the mouse Cancel or Allow?"). At this point it's no more annoying than Unbuntu or OSX prompting for a user password before installing software. In some ways it's less annoying, since you don't actually have to type your password, though it's also slightly less secure. On the annoying scale I'd place UAC at "Slightly annoying, and no worse than any other current OS".
It still takes me longer to accomplish the same tasks.
Since you don't give any details here, all I can say is it seems like a work flow issue. Yeah, they moved some stuff around. Finding it all can occasionally be a pain, but generally once I do find it I usually have to admit that it's in a more logical place. Just because we've memorized hundreds of idiosyncratic locations for stuff over 15 years of Windows use, doesn't mean those thing were actually in logical places.
Aero is nice, but still a pale imitation of Compiz/Kwin.
True, but it's a huge improvement over the previous iterations of Windows. You can't say "Windows 7 isn't as nice as Windows XP, because Aero isn't as good as Compiz." in the line of Windows upgrades Aero is a huge improvement. Especially now that it no longer devours resources like a five year old with free candy.
DirectX 11 has been completely ignored by the game industry.
Also true, but largely because so many people are still on XP. Which was Vista's fault, not Windows 7. Give it a few years and things will switch. Though personally I wish the industry would take a page out of Blizzard's book and use OpenGL to ensure easy simultaneous Mac and PC (and theoretically even Linux) releases.
Once Microsoft's latest release claims it can now support patching without reboots, but literally every patch Tuesday since the first beta have still required reboots.
Really? I've also been running it since Beta, and I've noticed no such thing. I'd say about once a month or so at most. Linux and OSX require reboots for patches nearly as often. No OS can patch the kernel (and have the patch actually take effect) without a reboot.
I run Windows 7 because it is the latest release, but I wouldn't say I have nothing but praise for it.
I think OP did say "almost". Windows 7 isn't perfect by any means, but I have to say that it's the first version of Windows in a long time that I'd say was no worse than any of the competition. I still prefer Linux or OSX, but largely for reason of personal opinion and how I personally do things rather than inherent flaws in the current version of Windows.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
For myself, I would call Win 2k as actually superior to Win XP. While XP does more things and has more whistles and gadgets, Win 2k is good for what id does. The largest problems with Win 2k is that Microsoft has stopped supporting it and has deliberately thrown in a monkey wrench to kick people off of that (now competing for mindshare) OS.
The jump from Win NT 4 and the abomination called Windows ME (better yet, Windows 98) was huge, and it was a clear step in the correct direction. If you say that Windows 2000 was awful on day one, I take it you never tried "Windows 286" (aka Windows version 2). From day one with my experience on Win 2k was substantially increased stability and complete compatibility with NT 4. If it ran on NT 4, it would run on Win 2k and usually do better. There were a few problems with old DOS-era legacy apps and stuff that used obscure (aka "undocumented") API hooks from the Windows 95/98/ME line that failed on Windows 2000, but that should be expected too if you understood the operating system. XP was OK and does some stuff good, but Vista was actually a step backward.
Windows 7 was finally a chance to fix what was wrong and get back on the right track.
Certainly I wouldn't call Windows 2K a failure on day one.
MS always take two goes to make a new OS - but apparently, this is somehow news
I keep hearing that Win2k was crap. Win2k was awesome! It not only took all the GUI from the more modern 98 line (over the basic 95 that NT4 used) but it also incorporated the "home user" experience that was sorely lacking from NT4. USB, Direct X (for games) and PnP were all part of Win2k and it still had the stability and relative security of NT4 (while lacking, it was still light years ahead of the 9x line. Need I say NTFS?)
NT3.51 was MS's fork of OS2. While it sucked when compared to modern OS's, it was still much better than any MS OS to date. Keep in mind that the top MS OS at this point was Windows 3.1 and DOS. NT's only server competition was Netware, which was stable, but nowhere near as scalable as OS2/NT3.51.
Win98 was the best 9x OS released. It offered working PnP, USB and even FAT32 (second edition). Again, a very nice OS for its day.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
While many user applications (Explorer, for example) were partially rewritten in .NET
... and I'm still waiting for the patch that allows me to hide the "Organize bar" and allows me to turn back on treeview lines, get rid of the "locations" crap and pretty much make it look like it used to.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Wake me up when anything useful actually *changes* about any Microsoft OS. Last time was back in 2001 (possibly 2004 if you count XP SP2). The interface changes, the "hidden internals" change (i.e. upgrade your drivers to WDM drivers), but the way you use the damn thing doesn't. And each time it gets slower - slower to run, more demanding on resources AND, somehow, slower to navigate and use in everyday life. It also has useful features ripped out, customisability thrown out of the window, old features limited and junk thrown in.
(Why can't I make 7 look like 2000 / XP Classic? Hell, I can move EVERY individual button, widget, dropdown and toolbar on my browser, I can change every hotkey and have it load it up in any number of different configurations at a click. I used to be able to have a good level of similar control over XP's basic interface, and even Office's, but now I can't even get rid of that stupid Start Menu at all, or put the Control Panel back how it used to be, or (now) turn off the stupid Ribbon bar? I don't *CARE* if it's faster, more efficient, etc. for some people - it isn't for me, and I'm the one using this particular computer).
What happened to WinFS, for example? It seemed like a good idea, was the only thing that *really* got people interested in Vista and then failed to make any appearance whatsoever ever since.
Seriously, give me a call around Service Pack 2 of the "next big OS". The one with features that I feel I could use and which would speed up my use of my computer. In the meantime, I think I'll just "struggle" along being able to boot up really quickly, customise heavily and not need a super-machine to run things that have always run fine. Until then, Microsoft's offerings are completely irrelevant to me and have been since 2001/2004.
No it isn't. UAC just trains them to confirm everything.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
10 developers
40 hours per week
12 weeks (3 months)
= 4,800 man hours
This is like the president of BP saying "thousands of tablespoons of oil were spilled into the Gulf of Mexico."
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
"Keep solidly in mind that it's NOT any more secure than XP (if you tell yourself that it is, keep deluding yourself...helps all the botnets...)"
I think the majority of that comes to market share and social engineering instead of actual system security. If Mac OS was the big king daddy system of choice, there'd be legions of people looking for ways to cheat their way into it, and the social engineering angle of phishing, scamming, clickjacking and all the other tricks and traps used by people to get you to compromise your system integrity would be turned against it. Same with Linux or any other OS you care to name. It's less a case of these systems being more secure and more a case of the people running the botnets playing to their audience. In short, you're not worth trying to rob, when there's legions more users of another OS to target.
A skilled thief breaks into houses. A clever thief gets -invited- into them.
Really the Vista analogue is Win2k. I think that Win2k:XP and Vista:Win7 are very parallel. I don't think people remember how truly awful Win2k was on day one. I installed it the week it was released and it was incompatible with so much of my hardware I was offline for three weeks until I just went back to 98SE (which I used until XP came out). ...
I had a very different experience with Windows 2000. I had already jumped from Win9x to Windows NT 4 as my primary desktop operating system. The upgrade to 2000 was easy for me because all my devices already had drivers. To this day I prefer 2000 over XP because of the more streamlined interface, smaller memory footprint, and better stability. Unfortunately, more and more software is coming out that does not support 2000. I think that Microsoft's mistake, with 2000 and then with Vista, was in selling retail and upgrade versions too soon. The hardware incompatibilities you mention with 2000 and that we saw with Vista were due mostly to manufactures not having available drivers. If MS would have only provided OEM licenses for 6 months to a year, there would have been less trouble. Of course, MS made many more mistakes with Vista in regards to hardware requirements. They allowed OEMs to certify machines as Vista Ready or Capable that didn't have enough memory for the OS, they allowed OEMs to turn on Aero Glass on machines with substandard integrated graphics, and they caved to pressure to release a 32bit version of the operating system. These mistakes are what allowed Vista's reputation for slow performance to take root.
Your going to give me a free upgrade to Windows 7 then right Ballmer? No, I didn't think so. FU Ballmer!
Touting Aero was a clear sign that the developers didn't understand usability. You don't get an easier-to-use system by making it prettier. You restructure your information in a way that is clear and intuitive to make an easier-to-use system. If the user still has to go to a control panel to set a preference for their e-mail client, it isn't an easy-to-use system.
Vista broke compatibility with a lot of applications and hardware drivers, and ran slower. In exchange, the user got... another layer of confusing dialogs plastered over everything, and a security model that trained users to automatically click "ok" whenever a pop-up came up. It didn't provide the resolution-independent user interface that would have justified the graphics card requirement. It didn't have the badly-needed filesystem upgrade. All networking additions were just one more layer of kruft to go wrong, and broke compatibility with lots of XP servers for no appreciable benefit (partly because the file system upgrade didn't happen).
Win 98 provided much needed stability and internet integration over Win 95. Win Me was a stopgap Win 98, and failed in the market. Windows XP was a huge security and stability step up from Windows 98. Windows Vista was another stopgap, and failed. Windows 7 was an attempt to atone for Vista, providing a more coherent user experience and some nice UI upgrades, and has done well.
The ______ Agenda
Except that rule doesn't quite apply for these conditions. Security through obscurity applies mainly when protecting a specific item of value, one that the attackers typically know are there. (Like a visible but WEP protected network)
General wide security attacks are aimed instead at compromising masses of systems, and here the time-effort versus reward ratio for Mac OS and Linux is very poor. This is (according to the same security experts who logically vouch for security through obscurity) due to a combination of the poor install base (you do need very different approaches for tackling the UNIX systems), and on the Linux side much better grasp of Security. Security breaches do happen on Linux systems, but because of a combination of both factors they are rare.