Ballmer Says Microsoft Wasted Time On Vista 375
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.
Change for the sake of change (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Thanks for the insight, Ballmer (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Vista scrapped a lot (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Thanks for the insight, Ballmer (Score:4, Interesting)
I also think that XP was just about MS's best OS out of the gate. Yes, it was vulnerable like swiss cheese, but even before SP1 it was otherwise very stable and polished if you could keep the malware at bay.
Vista was utter crap on an unimagined scale. One update screwed my system so bad that every 24-48 hours it would stop handling HTTP, POP, and IMAP, but IRC would still work, as would ICMP. The computer was also being used as a gateway at that time and HTTP requests would work THROUGH it from other computers, but not FROM it. No amount of releasing/renewing the IP, updating drivers/firmware, or bouncing services around had any effect. It had to be restarted a minimum of every two days. This behavior persisted until SP1 came out. Like I said, utter crap.
I still haven't had a chance to try Win7, though from all the positive feedback I definitely will when I get around to my next system overhaul.
Re:Change for the sake of change (Score:4, Interesting)
That's pretty much the problem Vista had: No reason to use it.
Win95 was a leap ahead. From DOS and Win3.11. Sure, it was still kinda-sorta DOS-with-some-GUI under the hood, but it was the first time that the whole "DOS stuff" was neatly tucked away, not to be seen by the average user.
Win98 was the next big leap, a stable Win95, plus a few goodies, better networking, more out-of-the-box support for more hardware, more of everything.
W2k was the fusion of the NT line with the 9x line, the combination of the "office" and "game" areas, stability and compatibility. Plus USB support for the NT line.
XP was ... well, mostly flashy and gadget-y, but also much easier networking, better (and out of the box) WiFi support, smoother installation and better security (no, really. Not perfect, but certainly better).
Vista was ... well, new. And ... well, slower. And ... well, why the heck would I wanna use it? Even if I'm just in for the eye candy, Aero is not the big leap ahead in that area (and only available in the more expensive variants no Joe Randomuser ever buys).
Re:Change for the sake of change (Score:0, Interesting)
Re:"Man Hours of Innovation"? Ha. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Thanks for the insight, Ballmer (Score:3, Interesting)
I want to delete a shortcut on MY desktop, which prompts a UAC dialog, which I must address, despite the fact that I'm not changing the desktop for other users. After I confirm that, Windows prompts me yet again, asking if this is something I really want to do.
How can you defend that design?
Unncessary prompts like that just convince people to either turn it off, or just confirm everything.
Re:Thanks for the insight, Ballmer (Score:4, Interesting)
As for the Windows 7 UI, it doesn't speed things up for me. With XP I can close windows faster (right click on task button press C, in contrast windows 7 requires additional mouse movement to close the appropriate thumbnailed window - this is slower). I can easily set things up to launch programs or tools by creating folders[1] and short cuts in the start menu (and using Windows Classic Mode).
I use both Windows 7 and XP daily, and Windows 7 isn't more stable, it's actually a disappointment (not as big a disappointment as Vista).
The advantages of Windows 7 appear to be:
1) The per app volume control
2) Better alignment on 4K boundaries (but it's not really XP's fault that new hardware has such issues)
3) Better sandboxing (not that useful to me, since I don't use IE that much, and I run multiple browsers and some as different accounts).
4) Going to be supported for more years
5) Supports the latest DirectX stuff and graphics goodies.
The rest of the stuff just gets in the way of an "advanced" user willing to learn about how best to use the system - I haven't seen any features which actually help such users (the "god mode folder" is cool but it's more like a workaround to Window's 7 "sorry you need more clicks to do stuff now" UI)
[1] For example in Windows 95/2K/XP (and Classic Mode):
Create a folder called "1 Explore" in the start menu directory.
Create shortcuts in "1 Explore":
Name = Target
1 Explore Desktop = %SystemRoot%\explorer.exe ,
2 Explore Home Directory = %SystemRoot%\explorer.exe ,
3 Explore My Documents = %SystemRoot%\explorer.exe ,
4 Explore Downloads= %SystemRoot%\explorer.exe ,
C Explore C = %SystemRoot%\explorer.exe ,
D Explore D = %SystemRoot%\explorer.exe ,
E Explore E = %SystemRoot%\explorer.exe ,
F Explore F = %SystemRoot%\explorer.exe ,
etc
Note: _www_username is the name of the user account which my normal browser runs under (this way I already have my own sandboxing) - so even if my browser is pwned the malware cannot access my documents and other stuff.
Once you do this, you can press winkey, 1, 3 to explore My Documents (and you should set up the folder view so that you see the details and not some useless icons, this way you can sort by date, size etc.
winkey, 1, F will start the explorer to explore the F drive
I've also set winkey, 4 to launch the command prompt.
In contrast on Windows 7, winkey+<number> will just launch/foreground the relevant pinned apps or opened apps. That just limits you to just 9 (or 10?) items, there appears no way to set up your windows system to do what I normally do anymore, without resorting to a 3rd party app. Thus Windows 7 is worse for me.
Re:Thanks for the insight, Ballmer (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously? It's much improved over Vista, and there have been two times where it actually has caught some bad joojoo that otherwise may have caused trouble. I don't mind it at all.
Seriously? You think that security isn't intrusive? Man, talk about naive. When it comes down to it I will always be far, far more surprised at UAC actually stopping something malicious rather than the fact that users complain about it. That's not to say that UAC might still be the RightThing(tm) but that's a completely different argument.
Re:Thanks for the insight, Ballmer (Score:3, Interesting)
>>>There were a lot of jokes about Vista being a beta for Windows 7. It turns out that Vista inadvertently filled that role.
Vista isn't merely a beta of Windows 7. It's the same product. Win7 is identical to Vista, but with optimized code so it can fit inside 512 megabytes* (like vista was supposed to do in the first place). Vista NT6.0 is to Seven NT6.1 as 98 is to 98SE, or 2000 is to XP, or MAC OS 10.6.0 is to 10.6.1.
*
* I've even seen Seven running on a 256 megabyte machine - Microsoft did an excellent job with their code rework. Too bad they didn't do it three years earlier BEFORE they released Vista. Or as part of a free service park (SP3).
Re:Change for the sake of change (Score:3, Interesting)
Somebody should forbid them to use common words.. (Score:3, Interesting)
..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.
Re:Thanks for the insight, Ballmer (Score:2, Interesting)
I still haven't had a chance to try Win7, though from all the positive feedback I definitely will when I get around to my next system overhaul.
As stated above, it certainly has some tweaks that could be used, but overall it's a great operating system.
Amongst many other reasons why, it even boots and runs faster and smoother on my Dell Mini 9 than a stripped down version of XP. Seriously.
true. i'm baffled. it takes about 30 seconds for firefox to start up on xp and only about 5 on 7. on the same system.
Re:Thanks for the insight, Ballmer (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:"Man Hours of Innovation"? Ha. (Score:3, Interesting)
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it..." [thinkexist.com]"
Re:"Man Hours of Innovation"? Ha. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Microsoft is still way behind (Score:3, Interesting)
Cheap is relative though. That $8000 Compaq would be mighty expensive next to a Commodore 64 from that era which would run more around $400. Sure it was a lot less powerful, but for many users (myself included), we made do and did a lot of interesting things with those machines, which were even further down the cheaper side of the spectrum.
I think what honestly made IBM's take off originally was the fact that (after the BIOS was reverse engineered) you had tons of companies building them. Just more options there for the platform. It's just more attractive IMHO to look at buying into a platform where you can replace your system with any from a number of vendors rather than being stuck with any particular manufacturer.
Coincidentally, that's why I also see Android eventually taking more marketshare than iPhone. Both will likely be strong competitors in the near future, but I think being open to multiple manufacturers is a better option.
Re:"Man Hours of Innovation"? Ha. (Score:4, Interesting)