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.
Innovation? Part of the big problem was that there weren't killer features worth upgrading for. You could cite Aero, but it was a massive resource hog and is chasing the tail of Mac OS X and Linux. It wasn't innovation.
In so many areas Vista made needless changes that weren't improvments or innovations. It seems like they had no direction and needed to shuffle things around enough to convince people this was a new Windows release.
Windows Repair Install is gone with no apparent reason.
Every major ocnfiguration dialog is moved to another location. You need more clicks to accomplish the same tasks. This was a major usability regression with no apparent reason.
Vista's failure was because Microsoft had no idea what it wanted Vista to be. It is a failing of leadership. Leadership also failed in not reaching out to hardware manufacturers and working closer with them. ATI and NVidia had trouble working with the new Vista driver API (which was a mess). OEMs had trouble figuring out what exactly constituted "Vista capable" hardware.
It isn't because you spent too much innovating. It is because you spent too much time running around in circles.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
you havent whored yourselves out to music and media cartels to accommodate them with their draconian DRM wishes and user control schemes maybe ?
Read radical news here
There are many things to like about 7, but it retains all the usability regressions of Vista. Microsoft wasn't willing to admit Vista was a mistake, so they weren't willing to fix these issues.
UAC is still annoying to the point that I disable it completely. It still takes me longer to accomplish the same tasks. Aero is nice, but still a pale imitation of Compiz/Kwin. DirectX 11 has been completely ignored by the game industry.
Windows 7 has barfed on my RAID twice.
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.
I run Windows 7 because it is the latest release, but I wouldn't say I have nothing but praise for it.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Longhorn as it was called during its development scrapped some functionality during its development cycle. (It even got so much redefined that it was renamed from blackcomb to longhorn)
One very noteworthy is that everything was supposed to run on top of winFS, a database instead of a file system. On a lot of tools this was never completed. Also there would be more diversification between server and client versions. But as you know server and client diversification OS versions in vista/server 2008 are the same as XP/server 2003 edition.
But this just seems normal in any development process. In Unbunto you also see software tools that are no longer in the main package after a couple of years. If you knew what would be important in 4 or 5 years you could do optimal development, but the reality is that nobody can see that much in the future.
Longhorn never was a managed code approach, which is still a lofty research goal (and may still be brewing behind the scenes at Microsoft Research through Midori, Barrelfish, and Singularity.)
Longhorn did however try to incorporate a bunch of other research projects right from the get-go, most of which were spun off into individual projects or into existing products. Avalon was supposed to replace winforms, WinFS was supposed to replace NTFS, Palladium was supposed to be incorporated, etc. The development team was spinning their wheels trying to adapt to the latest demand to use the latest research products instead of developing along a stable path. By the time the "reset" came Microsoft had already missed their 3 year OS schedule and it was going to take another 3 to turn Longhorn into a releasable product. While many user applications (Explorer, for example) were partially rewritten in .NET, they represented only a small portion of the total code.
Windows 7 by comparison was released with teams focusing on milestones internally and not releasing or demonstrating any not-done-yet feature. Essentially each feature that a team proposed was a patchset on the Windows build and they would test it but if it did not make the cut, they didn't apply the patch to the milestone build. The Engineering Windows 7 blog goes into great detail about the development process that was vastly improved over Windows Vista's.
In my own opinion (and I've seen others state it, too), Windows 7 is just Windows Vista SP3. Microsoft had to break from the Vista brand because everyone (including the lay user) "knew" that Vista was a broken pile of junk. If they had heard Vista was bad and got a new computer with Vista on it, their mindset was to find all the little nuances that didn't seem just right and complain about it. Granted, there were many legitimate gripes, but even if Microsoft had fixed those, a user would still have the preconceived notion.
/me dons tinfoil hat.
Alternatively, there's this new and improved Windows 7! It's great, it's flashy! It fixes everything Windows Vista was. And so the general user does not have any preconceived ideas and walks in feeling good about their purchase and looks for the good in the OS.
Microsoft probably streamlined a lot of code, background services, and process flow so that the user experience would be improved. Plus, they could fix their underestimated minimum requirement (I think), sell a brand new OS (instead of giving the fixes for free), and improve their brand name.
For myself, I still haven't migrated. Something about DRM running in the background, not wanting to support companies that treat their customers like the criminal, etc.