Ballmer: We Wasted Too Many Years on Vista
Sounds like Ballmer regrets stuffing that Vista turkey with time and money.
Wednesday Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer addressed an audience of CEOs at the company's 14th annual CEO Summit. His speech covered business basics such as getting the product right, helping the customer, and remaining patient. The topics were apparently a surprise to the audience--Ballmer usually covers return on investment, equity and all that "bleh bleh bleh bleh bleh."
During the speech, Ballmer took an honest-yet-surprising turn and admitted that Microsoft fell short with Windows Vista. "We tried too big a task and in the process wound up losing thousands of man hours of innovation," Ballmer said. He added that Microsoft spent too many years building the Windows Vista operating system, but then paused to question about the appropriate time frame for research and development.
"What is the right window for innovation?" he asked the audience. "Six months? Ten years? Three years?" He said that the company has previously bet on things that are too far in the future, however he didn't specify any particular product (although Vista and the PC tablet are prime candidates).
Ballmer gave himself a pat on the back, however: the Xbox consoles hit the nail on the head in regards to racking in gaming-based revenue. He's also currently set his sights on cloud computing, forecasting that it will be a place where everyone will eventually work, tying together a conglomerate of phones, TVs, corporate-data centers, PCs, and anything else that can access and use Internet-stored software.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Queen of Jordan Rania Al Abdullah and Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett were just three out of a hundred CEOs in attendance of the CEO Summit.
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yes. yes you did. Let people upgrade to windows 7 for free.
Ballmer speaking sense?
I never thought I'd see the day!
In all honesty, most oems stuffed vista right out of the gate with crappy 512Mb pcs and lots of bloatware. It took awhile for them to catch up but I'll say this, Vista made people realise that they really do need to give operating systems enough ram, faster hard drives etc.
How many times have you sat there working on a laptop with 256Mb wanting to slap yourself?
In all honesty, most oems stuffed vista right out of the gate with crappy 512Mb pcs and lots of bloatware.
Totally agree, my dad bought a lenovo laptop with 512mb and a senseless amount of bloatware. After a fresh format to basic it ran much better.
Anyway, 7 is considerably better, so it seems like it wasn't wasted as they learnt and moved on.
It's appreciable that he admits his own & the company's mistakes. Try telling Steve Jobbs to do that.
@ ksampanna: History shows us that people only learn from their own mistake. No doubt Steve jobs thinks of himself as a god. Something I can see apple doing wrong right now is having too much hopes for the ipad and at the same time locking out adobe and many many other potential good software apps by now allowing an open platform. If i already paid a outragous premium for the hardware, why is apple still allowed to choose what I can install or use on the ipad? Just because they can doesnt really mean they should morally. If that goes to shits then down with Apple! I really hope google will make something really good soon with an open platform in mind and teach apple and steven a good lesson (kick him in the ass). I still wonder what makes more money for apple these days, from selling the ipad or the macbooks? It's kind of ironic for apple, wouldnt the sale of the ipad hurt the sale of their macbooks? I know apple always rip people off by never discouting their products and also making a hefty profit on all their products for their clean designs.
Rumours of Windows 8 in development.... what does he says about that??
win vista **** and Queen of Jordan Rania Al Abdullah is my country Queen i love it
I would have an apology for the many hours of my own and my clients time they wasted trying to role out this trash or /shudder even worse their enterprise voip product. I use the term product very loosely.
Glad he is sorry for his own wasted hours, I am practically welling up with tears here. Give my clients their money and costs back and I am sure we would all be crying tears of gratitude.
His comments on xbox have blown my mind: Billion dollar losses is a good thing. Having to put back releasing new hardware (holding back innovation for customers in the form of the next gen Xbox to try and counteract some of the loss leader effect from the previous version. Not to mention LIVE ruining the gaming industry for anyone not a 14 year old brace wearing obsessive with occasionally bouts of tourettes. The extremely high failure rates publicized as the red ring of death.
Mr Ballmer. Enjoy your remuneration and go back into the safety of your office which must be nicely insulated from reality by the babble of corporate yes men.
Someone please provide the world with an alternative OS we can use out of the box and make my dream of never having to attend another microsoft seminar or training session a reality.