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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.
Obvious futility is obvious.
Living With a Nerd
"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.
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.
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
"Fucking innovative".
OMG!!! Ponies!!!
Way too much Ballmer, I'd say.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
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.
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.
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.
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
What everyone else knew in minutes
I'm not a Microsoft employee, but Win 7 is hardly based on Vista, and 7 is a success (in the market). So, maybe Vista was not a success on the market, but provided the common base for 7.
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.
I have wasted a lot of time on Vista as well.
How do you be patient?
I can has patience? I had a patience but grammar eated it.
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!
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.
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.
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
The reason there are no "thousands of man hours of innovation" within Microsoft is because the culture is not conducive to innovation so the innovators don't show up in the first place. I'd work there if Ballmer could guarantee me cover when innovation actually happens.
MS always take two goes to make a new OS - but apparently, this is somehow news
I refuse to install moonlight to watch Ballmer.
Operating system innovation basically stopped in the 70s. Today, its just a tuning of features and applications outside of the operating system realm. So long as an operating system today can do things like mount industry standard local and remote filesystems (things like iso images, NFS, etc), can get on the internet (preferably w/o the necessity of 3rd party applications to keep your computer working), have a fairly consistent and usable UI and extensibility via scripting and programming, and of course play games!!! Then your OS is ready for 2010.
I've heard that Windows is great at playing games.
Vista worked perfectly - to get people to buy 7, just like New Coke got people to buy Classic Coke.
Disclaimer: I just installed Vista 2 weeks ago after having the free upgrade discs sitting around for years. After 2 days worth of non-stop updating I have to say it works almost as well as the RC 7 I'd been using previsouly.
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.
You're thinking of invention, or inventiveness.
Something is inventive when it is new and has not been done before, as opposed to something being innovative when it is an improvement over something that previously exists - An incremental upgrade can be innovative, while not inventive, something that is inventive, however, is by definition, also innovative.
It requires that you do things entirely differently than everyone else.
No, that would be inventiveness.
nor IE anything.
I would say that introducing XMLhttpRequest something like 10 years before anyone else (circa IE 4-5), you know the thing that's at the heart of this whole ajax/web2.0 nonsense can be considered inventive.
But hey, very few people are inventive, innovation on the other handf isn't all that uncommon. Then again, there are those non-innovative/non-inventive people who cry bloody murder over how pantens supposedly cripple innovation (by which they usually mean inventiveness) because patents prevent them from using somebody else's idea (you'd think a mechanism which forces someone to conceive a new method for something would actually, by definition, encourage innovation, but I digress).
Yeah, it's fun and trendy to rag on Microsoft, but few in the oss/slashdot/linux circle seem to even know what the word means.
I didn't like Windows Vista because it was bloated and heavy, but I remember (back then)that we had to update our in-house kernel driver because it was so badly written. The driver SDK that came with Vista complained a lot more about bad driver code programming and, I think, helped elevate the drivers quality overall. You also had to have your driver signed on 64 bit editions. I think that's a plus for Vista, and helped pave the road for better drivers (from 3rd party hardware developers) for the release of Windows 7.
Maybe Ballmer should ask Mark Shuttleworth.
Vista was one of the biggest pieces of crap I ever used. The worst part about it is that it was shoved down your throat in all new PC purchases. Thankfully I built my own desktop, but when I purchased a laptop I didnt have a choice and got stuck with Vista. That being said, Windows 7 is a pretty good OS, but I don't know if it forgives Vista.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
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.
Semantics
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
Rewriting your OS in manage code isn't innovative, it's stupid. And even if it wasn't it would be a novelty, maybe, but still not innovative. Innovation means breaking new ground, not just reapplying what you already knew. Operating System + managed code != innovation.
"Fucking innovative".
You speak as though "innovation" is a bad thing....
Oh wait! When Balmer says it, it usually is.
Nevermind.
:)
as opposed to "magical", "revolutionary", "great", "awesome", "phenomenal", etc...?
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.
Or, perhaps more accurately, of throwing away your whole codebase halfway through and restarting, and still expecting to meet your original deadline. If you expected it to take 4 years (for example), and find out your first year did nothing, you're now trying to complete a 4 year project in 3. Is it any wonder Vista had such difficulty?
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
But it was Windows - remember when everyone thought it was just a fad?
I refuse to install moonlight to watch Ballmer.
I find myself needing to "install" some moonshine before I can handle watching Ballmer.
.
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.
Yeah, because security is a stupid goal. A proper (and popular) managed OS would be revolutionary. And it's the way we're heading, whether you like it or not.
Microsoft Wasted Time On Vista but.... I and the place I work for, did not.
Now it is up to the desktop support staff to figure out how to get several thousand XP boxes and user data migrated to Win 7 in a timely manner. Poor bastards!
pr0duct, BSD's
Actually, admitting that of the millions of hours killed into creating Vista only a couple of thousands was "innovation" seems quite right :)
Red Leader Standing By!
Insanely great?
ducks...
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. - Cardinal Wolsey
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.
Steve Jobs has gone for "magic".
Longhorn never was a managed code approach
Perhaps I exaggerated a little, but there was a big push to try to focus user space as primarily managed code. Singularity et al are doing crazy stuff with managed code in the kernel amongst other things, which is interesting but not what I was alluding to in my original post.
The Engineering Windows 7 blog goes into great detail about the development process that was vastly improved over Windows Vista's.
I'm aware, I followed the blog while it was still active. I particularly found the GDI concurrency post interesting. I wonder if having a similar blog for Vista would have allowed them to realise earlier on that it was going out of control.
the only thing wrong with microsoft's ability to produce quality software, is bad management. As with any organization or even organism, if the head is sick the body is also sick. There have been a couple products from M$ that have been great, Excel is one, and the late great Flight Simulator was another. Ok XP was pretty good after a few years of tweaking and updates.
How about my wasted money on Vista? My laptop (with Vista) would be useless, but for the fact I switched it to Ubuntu. It didn't even work well as an alternate boot option, so now I have a 'pure' Linux machine with regular upgrades for the asking. All W7 did was move the buttons in my opinion, but I'm not a geek.
Cairo ring a bell? Compiz? Enlightenment? Heck, E17 had the look that Mac OS X Tiger was aping for and Vista failing to get YEARS earlier! When Vista came out, you could get Aero effects on SuSE/Red Hat/Debian/et al on a tiny fraction of the CPU and GPU use.
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.
Don't forget - for some reason Microsoft decided to grey out the 'Copy Profile' button in Windows 7. Can anyone explain why the hell they did that?
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
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.
..for their products.
Really, ten years ago, vista was a cool word. Reminded you to the phrase "hasta la vista, baby" from a certain great move. Now you just think of a peace of shit.
Also explorer. Half a century ago you associated with Vasco da Gamma and Christopher Columbus. Now only a crappy shell remains.
Not to mention Windows and Word..
They deserve eternal damnation just for these crimes.
Microsoft has no connection whatsoever with their users and thats where their real problem lies.
How can you say that? Windows 7 was MY idea!
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
tablets?
YOU not take you meds recently
after all the hollywood morons and there buds bought one in the usa about one million what are sales like?
watch how awful they do in other countries that want somehting useful
and seriously ubuntu was actually far more useful then vista to me and others , and when they say i cant play games
wine and cedega and sourceforge
russian schools are open source watch them hurl ahead in years to come......
They need to do way install Seven who kill their Vista. It was on thew nwes thas morhing that redomnd in made OS msitakes.
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!
This solar system is wasting time on Ballmer!
Imagine if they used a *BSD core and then adopted Mono. While I personally think Mono is a waste of time in it's current form, making it a first-class Microsoft product along with an OS that runs well and is secure would make MS look pretty good.
Vista brought many changes to Windows that were very necessary, and a long time coming. It was the medicine needed to drag Windows into the 21st century IMO. Look at the levels of malware when XP first went gold, and the levels it rose to when Vista went gold; the hostilities of the normal user environment from one time to another is unrivalled, partly because of how long Vista was in development; partly because of the XP makeover that the increasing security threats prompted. Vista basically was supposed to be, not the final bullet in the Windows malware problem, but a significant one built from the ground up and such remediations always come at a price.
Security was only part of the rebuild & rethink effort though; there were other sections of the kernel that needed a makeover; networking; graphics; sound all got rebuilt from scratch to address various other problems, to name but a few. All changes were needed to support a core platform for the next-generation IMHO. Not to mention it was the first Windows to seriously do 64-bit.
Nay, the problem with Vista was it was too much all at once; the project did have a terribly unpredictable timeline and the OEMs understandably didn't want to commit to a project with no definitive delivery date; meaning the compatibility problem was magnified exponentially as very few committed to getting 100% compliant with the new OS.
Thankfully that's a problem that's in the past now; the growing pains have finished, and W7 success is testament to the foundation laid out by Vista; meaning it was not, IMO, a waste of time. Lessons learnt; time to move on.
throw new NoSignatureException();
Microsof wasted time, customer wasted money.
Umm, yes it is. (lol slashbots, +5 mod to an obvious untruth just because it bashes MS ...)
UAC, bitlocker / EFS, IE protected mode, enhanced firewall management, ASLR enabled (plus I think they improved it in win7) and Windows Defender installed by default, kernel patch protection, network access protection. Furthermore MS has for some time been carrying out more thorough code review, reducing "attack surface" e.g. removing unnecessary default services and sending coders on secure programming training.
Is it "secure"? Not really, but that's mostly the fault of end users running botnet.exe and ignoring UAC these days. Even in that regard they're trying to do something, Microsoft Security Essentials is free and a pretty good AV by all accounts.
"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.
The Engineering Windows 7 blog goes into great detail about the development process that was vastly improved over Windows Vista's.
And yet, by and large, they are more or less identical products.
Fixed that for you.
XP 64 was a bust and you had to buy it and where not able to use the same key as 32 bit.
Vista lets you use the same key for 32 and 64 so if had a oem system that came with 32 all you need is a 64 bit and you can use the same key.
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.
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it...""
I read it took a team of 30 people over a year to design the start menu and it looks almost identical to XP!
The search was improved and I like it, but that is about the only thing thats better. The tools Vista has to debug the OS are much better too, but I guess they had to add that after producing the code and realising that it didn't work (we need a better debugger in Windows). So they made the Reliability and Perfomance monitor - much better than the old task manager, but can someone please tell me what the svhost is doing :-)
So all the ideas and 'innovation' were removed when they realised they couldn't get the code to work.
MS should try design with less people in each team, and focus on an OO approach where features can be added in a linear fashion.
Well for Apple every product is completely revolutionary. Really a slightly smaller computer revolutionary? One with no peripheral ports and can't even print?
The linux community often gets really excited about small parts of the system: now with scheduler X that is 3% better than the previous one. To that I ask: and how much am I going to notice that on my day to day tasks?
In short: every major company even if all they sell is cow manure but especially a computer firm, wants to make you think that the next version of the product is something that is mind blowing.
Your going to give me a free upgrade to Windows 7 then right Ballmer? No, I didn't think so. FU Ballmer!
Perhaps Gates was referring to the 8760 man-hours of innovation that were lost. In other words, a whopping man-year. That's pretty much all of Microsoft's innovation for a decade.
Microsoft operating systems can never patch without rebooting,
because in Microsoft file systems, a file cannot exist without a name.
So you can't replace the running copy of a .exe or .lib with a new version,
because you have to delete the old version first to free up its name,
and you can't delete a running executable.
Instead, the new version is staged in a temp area,
the computer reboots,
and the OS replaces the old copy with the new copy early in the boot sequence,
before the old copy starts running.
Microsoft can never fix this problem,
because if they fixed this problem,
(and others like it)
then Windows would become Unix,
and then you might as well run Unix,
and then there wouldn't be any Microsoft.
It's not like they're inventing anything.
Remember when innovating actually meant "taking something good, and make it a little bit better?" Not massively better, just a little bit. Now the term innovation gets thrown around to mean everything from re-releasing old software to creating entire new forms of human endeavors.
"Our new human teleporter is an innovation like the world has never seen before."
"What is it innovating on?"
"...Paradigms!"
Clearly, innovating on multimedia superhighways will empower your manpower to leverage crowdsourced intellectual property into killer app development process upgrades. All of the previous words technically have meaning, but you insult the intelligence of your audience by using them.
The ______ Agenda
Nice try, but security through obscurity has been debunked countless times.
Since when has Microsoft actually innovated anything ?
Windows is just an apple/atari/amiga clone.
The 'innovative' project natal is a Wii controller clone (with bells on)
Its not like office packages did not exist pre-MS, I remember using Wordworth on the Amiga in the late 80's - and guess what that didn't crash...
OSX and Linux had 3D desktops pre Vista (not really used Macs but Compiz kick the sh*t out of the effects in Vista (and a lot less resource intensive)
Aside from not following standards and creating an illegal monopoly (according to the EU) what have Microsoft ever innovated ?
Have you listened to top brass of any large company with a large R&D?! They all use nice words.
You are equating R&D with productization. Microsoft Research is much more diverse than you think it is. That includes funding a shitload of basic sciences research which is not even intended to find a place within any product. Maybe taking a look at the research areas and the thousands of published papers would help you understand what Microsoft Research and its R&D resources are about.
Microsoft has been saying this for over a decade. WinFS (and its earlier names) has been tossed around since before Win2K.
It is much more secure than xp.
UAC, which allows old application, requiring admin rights under xp, to run under user's account. Firewall, which now can filter outbound connections and offers better configuration capabilities. Protected mode for ie, which mitigates most exploits. Holes in ie are really exploitable only on windows xp.
Address space randomization. SEH is now secure, under xp it was possible to change exception handler's address (if the application itself had an exploitable buffer overflow, of course) and use it to execute code.
Automatic detection of stack overflow, which works in most cases. Driver signing (mandatory on 64 bits), life is much harder for rootkits now. Also PatchGuard, which prevents modification of code in ring0 space.
DNSSEC support.
Session 0 isolation, which mitigates most of the shatter attacks.
Crucial system's binaries are checksumed at startup.
Many more drivers are user space now, this makes the attack vector size smaller. Things like ring0 access via unsecure printer's driver aren't possible now.
Password's hash method was changed from md5 to sha256.
Most of there are present in vista, if not all.
And thats just from my memory. You are obviously horribly ignorant and clueless.
go down under in the down under. Well, at least taping or photographing it is...
"In true dialogue, both sides are willing to change" --Thich Nhat Hanh
Windows 7 is more of a p.r. release.
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.
Vista failed as a commercial proyect for two reasons:
- Word of mouth it was bad
- It was bad.
Vista failed as a software proyect for this (and other reasons):
- Microsoft strategy is aganst modular design. This put a ceiling to how complex things can be.
- Microsoft seems to like complex things for the sake of it. This accelerate the rate at we get near the ceiling.
Vista idea was probably good, the implementation not soo much, the people that tried to create it ...very wrong, the culture ..absolutelly atrocious, the company... criminal, and the worth of mouth, very bad.
Windows 7 is a service pack for Vista. Theres positive worth of mouth for it, and does some 2 or 3 things right, so with the almost same code is working. But I don't think is better than Vista for much, maybe a 8%, or 12%. Maybe the bigger error was making the early testers of Vista angry with a few horrible bugs, like that one where video thumbnails where updated while the files where copied, making copying videos or other multimedia stuff very slow.
Windows 7 is still ugly and stupid. But since the desktop is pointless now (we all do the important thing on the web, not on the desktop) is not all that important. In that sense, Microsoft has a free card to sell a very ugly and retard OS. Windows 7 make for a decent Firefox launcher.
-Woof woof woof!
*sarcasm* Are you trying to say Microsoft doesn't innovate every single time they incrementally update Office? Are you trying to say Microsoft doesn't innovate every single time they incrementally update Windows? Are you trying to say Microsoft doesn't innovate every single time they incrementally update SharePoint? Are you trying to say Microsoft doesn't innovate every single time they incrementally update MSSQL? Are you trying to say Microsoft doesn't innovate every single time they incrementally update Visual Studio? */sarcasm* They have something I could only dream of at MS: all they need to do is add a few things, fix a few bugs and increment a version number and they will automatically make droves of money from it. Innovation they do not have. I don't even remember the last time they took a risk and released something totally new. It sure wasn't Office, it sure isn't the *new* Hotmail and I'll bet my life on the fact that it won't be Office 2012.
'We tried too big a task and in the process wound up losing thousands of man hours of innovation'
We're mostly good at copying other peoples inventions and no good at doing any real original work!
Yes, I remember that push... so much of a push to get managed code in the userspace that they had to gag Richard Grimes threatening to remove his MVP status.
Just goes to show how much at Microsoft is about marketing, and how little is technical excellence.
He is talking about himself. Vista does not come until the eleven minute mark. Up to that point he commiserates about the struggles in getting R&D to product. Toward the Vista remarks, he mentions the years and $6-7 billion that it took to get X-Box successful. His revelation, mostly to himself, is that 6-7 years for a new version of Windows was a huge mistake. Of course, he does not go into the details, such as Bill's departure, etc. The point was that it took too long and, therefore, got out of hand. Hardly a confession, but he definitely hints at his failings. The key to successful software is keeping up with your market, and Vista was developed thinking Microsoft defined the market, hugely narcissistic.
Customers tolerate problems and shortcomings as long as they are solved before they become issues. While Microsoft took years to upgrade their OS, the market model went from shrink-wrap product to the cloud. People will not wait for their next software in a box. He seems to get this now, but they clearly haven't figured out how to keep their margins. The rest of the 31 minutes is an equivocation of that ambivalence.
Sounds just like the KDE 4 clusterf**k. Except those morons can't admit it.
We all do the important thing on the web? On what planet?
2000 is to XP
Yes and no.
In the corporate world, XP was just a very small evolution over 2k, mostly featuring a different skin.
BUT!...
For consumer, XP was the next product which replaced (gasp!) Windows ME (i feel dirty) and put an end on the old DOS-based lineage of windows OSes. It's the messiah which delivered the poor users from one of the worst Microsoft products ever.
Thus XP did see massive uptake among users.
Whereas, the predecessor of Vista, Win XP, is good enough for most people, thus a lot less people have a real incentive to move forward to a newer version. So expect the Vista->7 transition to be even less popular than the 2k+ME->XP.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
...but that was only because I waited for the driver problem to get sorted out before buying Vista. :P
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
I'm not sure what your sources are, but I dare say they are rather suspect, given that WinForms was never a part of Windows proper (it's a .NET library, which is a fairly straightforward OO wrapper on top of Win32 API, nothing more). It ships with Windows since Vista, in a sense that it comes as a part of .NET, and OS ships with .NET. But it's not something that affects the OS development as such.
how does this man think they'd have shipped windows 7 without having spent the time to develop vista.
Not for me, if the context is microsoft I always think 'fistula' and 'exploder'.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
"...in the process wound up losing thousands of man hours of innovation". Yeah, and that's just your company. My test team still has to support that steaming pile, and so every test pass involves firing up VMs just for the off chance that those that aren't still on WinXP didn't jump to Win7. I don't know how many hours we've wasted on Vista (because like any place else, we're not completely automated), but I'd axe Vista from the matrix tomorrow if I thought I could get away with telling sales and marketing, "we don't support Vista".
Still cant understand why Microsoft just didnt fix XP.
Instead of beeing stuck in Vista/7/8/9.
There's many useful and excellent (truly) innovative 3rd party
software out there that solve several Windows problems. But
they cant solve all because only Microsoft has the access to
actually implement actual(!) fixes and improvements into
Windows itself.
Took the blog right outta my mouth!
Do you see what I did there?
I totally agree. MS has never been a leader in innovation of any kind. They steal other's true innovative ideas late, and then use their marketing muscle and market share to move the product.
Don't explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to a virgin. -- Robert A. Heinlein
Of course, as you note, they are (given their R&D resources) about the most un-innovative company you could imagine.
Absolutely true. The only product I have ever encountered that I would consider even REMOTELY innovative is the ICE program (Image Composite Editor). This is from Microsoft Research. I tried out about 7 or so other panorama maker programs, included FOSS programs. They were really hard to use. The ICE program is like magic. Select the pictues, hit stitch and "viola" instant panorama.
Don't explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to a virgin. -- Robert A. Heinlein
"We tried too big a task and in the process wound up losing thousands of man hours of innovation,"
This sounds about right. Remember - if you work 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year (us tech types can only dream of such a light schedule...) you are working 2000 hours a year, i.e. "thousands of man hours".
They way I figure, they hired one guy (probably a contractor) as an "innovator", and ended up wasting his time for a year before they let him go.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
It's not exactly a perfect nor complete solution, but this has sure made win7 a lot more bearable for me.
--- Do you believe in the day?
This post isn't insightful; it makes a stupid argument, not backed-up by any evidence, that isn't even close to original.
LOL, that's a good description of your post.
Look, I get your point: MS had to replace XP with something. But to suggest that they didn't waste a buttload of time rearranging the deck chairs...well, you've obviously never read this post.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
The Engineering Windows 7 blog goes into great detail about the development process that was vastly improved over Windows Vista's.
So it took Microsoft 25 years of regular releasing to figure out how to create an operating system development process? What a load of rubbish.
The truth is that the blogs are another exercise in public relations for a company that has consistently and repeatedly failed. The only difference between any other Microsoft OS and Vista is that people noticed. With Windows 7, the blinkers are back. Microsoft has approached the marketing of version 7 from a new angle and have once again convinced people to shell out money for something that's resource hungry, unstable, over complicated, inconsistent and overpriced... the monopoly continues. The one thing Microsoft is good at is marketing(1), and that's most definitely something to be respected.
(1) See parent post from Microsoft shill
Yeah, like that's fucking likely.
There is nothing incorrect in saying "thousands of..." when the count is in the millions. It's is perfectly valid. I imagine it screws with most anal linux types, but then MS does that to these wannabes without much effort. Look at this story. You hate Ballmer yet here you are, "wasting thousands of man-hours" for sure.
Besides, Ballmer said "thousands of man-years". Idiots! always grasp at straws when the boat is gone, as if that'll help.
WinFS was supposed to replace NTFS
No it wasn't. WinFS was never a filesystem, it was a database layer sitting on top of a filesystem. The idea has been being bounced around Microsoft since the early '90s.
By Winforms I mean the Windows Forms API for Win32 & the MFC wrapper typically used for it. Sorry if I used the wrong term. My bad!
I wish I were getting paid, but I'm sure I'm way too vocal to be employable by Microsoft!
By Winforms I mean the Windows Forms API for Win32
Yeah, and everything I wrote in my previous post applies to the product called "Windows Forms". There's no such thing as "Windows Forms" in Win32 API. It's only a part of .NET - an assembly called System.Windows.Forms.dll, containing classes in namespace System.Windows.Forms.
The API facet for user interface in Win32 is pretty much nameless, though occasionally you hear it being referred as user32, by the name of the DLL in which most functions reside.
The funny thing is that WPF (Avalon) is supposed to be a replacement for Windows Forms - so that claim is fully correct. It still holds true today - WPF is the recommended UI framework of choice on Windows platform. It's just that it doesn't imply rewriting major portions of Windows.