Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
.
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.