Ballmer's Biggest regret is Vista developement

[GoodBytes]

In an short 15min interview by, Mary Jo Foley from ZDNet with Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, who announced will take his retirement next year from now, asked what was Ballmer Biggest regret. Ballmer responded that it was Vista development.

 

Q: Your biggest regret?

Ballmer: Oh, you know, I've actually had a chance to make a lot of mistakes, and probably because, you know, people all want to focus in on period A, period B, but I would say probably the thing I regret most is the, what shall I call it, the loopedy-loo that we did that was sort of Longhorn to Vista. I would say that's probably the thing I regret most. And, you know, there are side effects of that when you tie up a big team to do something that doesn't prove out to be as valuable.

 

Source and check out the entire interview:

http://www.zdnet.com/microsofts-ballmer-on-his-biggest-regret-the-next-ceo-and-more-7000019810/

[Jack.EXE]

I actually liked vista...

[totjup5]

Compared to windows 8 Vista was a masterpiece. 

[CobaltMK33]

I actually liked vista...

I bet you liked Bulldozer too.

[GoodBytes]

Same here. I likes Vista. It was a good OS (if you had the computational power to run it. Things was so fast compared to XP)

 

But the development of Vista was a mess, and its understandable why Ballmer regret it.

 -> They did a big detour in the middle of it, making a lot of feature not happen, and had to be pushed into Windows 7 and 8.

 -> It resulted Complete layout inconsistency between built-in programs

 -> It also resulted in a lack of polish and documentation at release, for users, IT and developers.

[Jack.EXE]

I bet you liked Bulldozer too.

Maybe.

[JAKEBAB]

i liked the look of vista but not necessarily the os its self it wasnt very well optimized used alot of resources and didnt have features that windows 7 has that i like eg drag a window to the side of the screen and it resizes to fit only half the screen.

[GoodBytes]

i liked the look of vista but not necessarily the os its self it wasnt very well optimized used alot of resources and didnt have features that windows 7 has that i like eg drag a window to the side of the screen and it resizes to fit only half the screen.

 

Yes, but Vista was before Windows 7. And after XP. So it had features that XP didn't. Of course Win7 will have features that Vista didn't.

[Beskamir]

Vista wasn't bad. I like the dreamscene feature which was removed for windows 7 but I have figured out to get it back:D In general I agree with most of the people here. Vista's UI was nice but behind the scenes it was a mess...

[Valinor]

I liked Vista, but I never had any issues with it. I'd probably not have the same opinion if I'd had a lot of issues...

[solomongrundy]

Compared to windows 8 Vista was a masterpiece. 

What didn't you like about Vista? Were you running it on a Pentium 2?

 

Edit:Read your post again...I see that you don't like Windows 8 for whatever reason. So I ask again, what don't you like about 8? Are you running it on a P2?

[qwertywarrior]

I actually liked vista...

liking Vista is violation of CoC

[DirkaFat]

Compared to windows 8 Vista was a masterpiece. 

Other way around

[Jack.EXE]

liking Vista is violation of CoC

Other way around

No.

[solomongrundy]

I liked Vista, but I never had any issues with it. I'd probably not have the same opinion if I'd had a lot of issues...

I didn't have any issues with it either.  I remember most of the people complaining about Vista were still on Windows 98...they had no business commenting on the OS when they never even used it themselves.

 

When I switched to Windows 7, it felt like a trimmed and streamlined Vista to me. And Windows 8 seems like a streamlined Windows 7 geared towards taking advantage of modern tech.

 

People are bandwagoners.

[qwertywarrior]

i had xp

i moved to windows vista

 

specs at the time:

QX6700 - 4GB ram - 150GB raptor RAID 0

 

it was slow and the interface wasnt welcoming 

[GoodBytes]

What was your GPU? Vista 32 or 64-bit?

Was Aero enabled? Did you have the SATA controller drivers? motherboard drivers? Did you tweak the OS in any way? (I know a lot of people were disabling a bunch of stuff because they were used to from XP, but instead of helping, it made things much worse, as they disabled things they didn't know what it was or cared what it was).

[Shrubpig]

Compared to windows 8 Vista was a masterpiece. 

What's with the hate for Windows 8? :(

[IPCharger]

Windows RT anyone?

[R4STABAN]

If I was him my biggest regret would be being a strange buffoon

[AmateurPCGuy]

I had my time with Vista (prolly spent 1-2 years with it) and I had my ups and downs with it.

 

1. Interface is good; really good. It was love at first sight for Aero.

2. Yet, it was slow; Too.Damn.Slow! I had 1 GB of RAM on a Dual Core Intel 775 with an Asus P5KPL-CM (integrated graphics) and 80 GB hard drive (IDE) and it's speed ranges to "Okay.. Considerable..." to "You Friggin' Turtle!". Meanwhile, this exact same machine runs XP like it was Usain Bolt. Fast.

3.According to an article with the same topic I read at Softpedia (http://news.softpedia.com/news/Steve-Ballmer-s-Biggest-Regret-Windows-Vista-377894.shtml), Only 5% of computers in the world run Vista while XP, an OS retiring in approximately 8 months, is being run by 37 percent. Guess people still believes that XP is faster than Vista not knowing that Vista can outrun XP if their units are within Vista's requirements... and I was one of them...

[xBlizzDevious]

Compared to windows 8 Vista was a masterpiece. 

 

I was forced to use Windows Vista for over a year. God I hated it, having said that, it was an interesting experience and I'm glad I had it as it's so different to XP and I learnt a lot about computers when I had that OS - mainly to try and make it a more pleasurable experience I think.

 

I have used Windows 8 many times now and I've tried to force myself to upgrade. Total usage time of Windows 8 is probably around 2 months. I just cannot use it. I have programs which are incompatible, installing games often causes a lot of issues, even with ClassicShell, it's not as good a GUI as 7 but with that said, I do like the square edges more for some reason. There's many reasons why I don't like Windows 8 and that's just a few. I think that I feel the same about 8 as I do Vista. They're both pretty bad and not my favourite OSes by a long shot.

[GoodBytes]

 

2. Yet, it was slow; Too.Damn.Slow! I had 1 GB of RAM on a Dual Core Intel 775 with an Asus P5KPL-CM (integrated graphics) and 80 GB hard drive (IDE) and it's speed ranges to "Okay.. Considerable..." to "You Friggin' Turtle!". Meanwhile, this exact same machine runs XP like it was Usain Bolt. Fast.

 

Your computer only meet the requirement to get Vista running. Not actually running it smoothly.

 -> Your 80GB HDD was too old, and insufficient space, meaning it was near full. On any Windows a near full HDD slows things down, let alone be able to defrag. It was probably 5400RPM HDD, or  areally slow 7200RPM HDD. As it was on IDE, not only the interface was slower than SATA-2, but also didn't support AHCI.

 -> Your Intel integrated graphics only meet Windows Vista minimum system requirements, not recommended.

 -> 1GB of RAM is insufficient, because you have the Intel integrated graphic solution, which took a chunk of your system RAM out.

 -> You were not using the latest technologies

 

Assuming you actually had a Core 2 Duo in your system, that was the only thing that was fitting Vista requirements.

[sof006]

People were complaining about Vista being "crap" because systems that were out at the time were not ready for Vista. Vista was a modern OS that was too demanding for current hardware at the time. That is why it ran like a piece of *@#! on launch.... people were running it on what were XP machines. And the new machines being sold in stores weren't any better.

 

Then came along the Core 2 Quad machines and early i5/i7 processors which had no problem dealing with Vista. Also IDE vs SATA etc. 

[GoodBytes]

Very true. But if you had a high-end gaming PC, Vista 64-bit ran better than XP. The big question is if you were able to afford a 750$ CPU or not, and not skimping the rest.

I think that Microsoft took the decision to be ahead, to have a core OS essentially, that will have good ground for many years to come. Ideally, Vista should have come a year letter, allowing more time for polish, and have an "in-between" OS. But sadly, XP could not be pushed further... I mean that OS was falling apart in terms of security. The UI would have been behind Linux based OS and MacOS, and more.

Sure, it COULD have been possible to fix this... but it would require significant man power, which would push Vista release maybe another 2 years. Making it, that instead of having Windows 7, we would be on Vista now. And have Windows, be behind, playing catchup with the rest. Sure they could have hired more people, and I guess pull a Windows 2000, where was released in late 1999, and in 2001 we have XP. In other words, having a 1-2 year transition OS. But that would piss people off. The only reason why it didn't with 2000, is that nothing ran on Windows 2000, due to being based on Windows NT, and not Windows 9x core, so no one used it, that is why Microsoft rushed released Windows Me.

 

But what Steve Ballmer is saying, and that is true, from what I have read (assuming those are true), during Vista development, is that team didn't really communicate between each other properly, there was a lot of switching around of ideas, even at the interface level. There was a lot of miss communication, and team competing with each other (an issue, hopefully solved with the recent or currently undergoing transition) which created numerous delays for such large undertaking (it's not easy to make a new OS, from virtually scratch, and magically, not only compatible with billion of hardware configuration possibilities, but also software, and try and be better than the previous version.