Ballmer b*tch slaps Vista

By Kelly Fiveash
18 Apr 2008 15


Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has admitted that Windows Vista is an incomplete product, even though the operating system has been on the market for more than a year.

Speaking at the firm's annual Most Valuable Professionals event in Seattle yesterday, Big Steve told the gathered crowd that the unloved OS was "a work in progress". According to reports, he also promised that Microsoft would learn from the mistakes it has made with Vista.

"It's a very important piece of work. We did a lot of things right and have a lot of things we need to learn from," said Ballmer. "Certainly, you never want to let five years go between releases."

He acknowledged that "Vista is bigger than XP", but he wasn't referring to the popularity of the product. Instead, he was pinpointing one of the major issues many customers saddled with the product have complained about: performance.

"We have to make sure it doesn't get bigger still and that the performance and the battery and the compatibility we're driving on the things that we need to drive hard to improve."

Yesterday's admission will be seen by many as poorly timed, coming just weeks after service pack one (SP1) for Vista arrived – well, at least for some customers – in a manual form.

In mid-March Microsoft issued a staggering number of reasons as to why plenty of people would not be able to get their mitts on the service pack. Issues included a number of security products that won't start up or run on updated desktops thanks to "compatibility problems".

Earlier this week Microsoft spat out Vista SP1 in the remaining 31 languages. Those versions arrived a full month after the service pack first landed for a select few across the globe.

Meanwhile, the automatic version of the download remains missing in action. Redmond had chalked mid-April as the date when SP1 would start downloading onto computers across the world. But it's reluctantly stepped away from that deadline because it "wants to ensure customers have the best possible experience".

Ballmer also accepted yesterday that customers are incredibly reluctant to shake off XP in favour of adopting its unruly little brother, Vista.

"We have a lot of customers that are choosing to stay with Windows XP, and as long as those are both important options, we will be sensitive, and we will listen, and we will hear that.

"I got a piece of mail from a customer the other day that talked about not being able to get XP anymore, and we responded: XP is still available. And I know we're going to continue to get feedback from people on how long XP should be available. We've got some opinions on that."

Windows XP was given something of a reprieve earlier this month for bargain basement PCs not equipped to run the memory-chugging Vista OS


Source: The Register

MS listen, how about this, take the great new features in Vista, add them to XP and BAM! release XP on speed.

I mean it is good that they are accepting the fact that Vista is not as great as it is cracked up to be and I have contemplated going back to XP but I instead went with Server 08.

Well, Ballmer is just saying what many of those who used the 4074 said back in the days when they dumped WinFS and came out with the 5xxx builds...

JabbaPapa wrote:

Well, Ballmer is just saying what many of those who used the 4074 said back in the days when they dumped WinFS and came out with the 5xxx builds...

That was one of my first thoughts when I started reading the article Grav!ty posted. Where's the WinFS????????

jbullard wrote:

MS listen, how about this, take the great new features in Vista, add them to XP and BAM! release XP on speed.

Ya, release a XP SE
Hopefully the (code named) Windows 7 will be a good one.

jbullard wrote:

but I instead went with Server 08.

Same here on 2 rigs anyway

the chances of MS coming out with XP SE are about the same as GM remaking the '57 Chevy. (-:

They should have waited until they had WinFS ready if that was a real possibility. Now what they may come out with could be Vista WFS and for us early adopters a conversion program to convert NTFS to WinFS

jbullard wrote:

MS listen, how about this, take the great new features in Vista, add them to XP and BAM! release XP on speed.

Now that's be a nice XP SP.

I miss 4074, it ran really well on my old p3 with only 256 mb ram and I would proberbly still be using it today as my main OS if my stupid IBM Deathstar hard drive hadn't done the "click of death". It was a lot faster than XP once you turned off the sidebar thing.
If I remember right, I also had 4074 running (a bit slowly) on an old p2 Abit be6-ii mobo with dodgy capacitors after I installed extra memory, as it needed at least 128 mb minimum lol

I don't know what Microsoft did to break it so badly, but I had to upgrade to a dual core with a gig of memory just to get new vista to run at all. Perhaps microsoft should roll back to 4074...

p.s. wasn't vista the name of the company that made the dried "just add hot water" beef biriani and chicken supreme tv dinners here in the UK about 20 years ago?

SP1 for Vista actually screwed up my computer boot time. I am still searching for why though.

yeshuas wrote:

They should have waited until they had WinFS ready if that was a real possibility. Now what they may come out with could be Vista WFS and for us early adopters a conversion program to convert NTFS to WinFS

FWIW the last peep I had out of Microsoft was 1) that they're still working on WinFS and 2) that it's a 64-bit file system unlike the 32-bit NTFS ...