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

Change for the sake of change

[Enderandrew]

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.

Uuuuh it wouldnt be as such if

[unity100]

you havent whored yourselves out to music and media cartels to accommodate them with their draconian DRM wishes and user control schemes maybe ?

Re:Thanks for the insight, Ballmer

[Enderandrew]

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.