Ballmer Calls Vista 'A Work In Progress' 345
shanen tips us to a Seattle Post-Intelligencer story about comments from Steve Ballmer at a conference earlier this week during which he referred to Vista as "a work in progress." He also admitted that the 5-year release cycle wasn't a good idea. Despite the approaching deadline for the end of XP sales, Ballmer's remarks about the older operating system were more ambiguous: "Vista is bigger than XP. It's going to stay bigger than XP. We have to make sure it doesn't get bigger still, and that the performance and that the battery life and that the compatibility, we're driving on the things that we need to drive hard to improve. 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, we've expressed our views. ... I'm always interested in hearing from you on these and other issues."
Ballmers Real Quote (Score:0, Informative)
Re:Software "architects?" Ha! (Score:5, Informative)
"The current embassy, which opened July 1, 2004 in the "Green Zone", is being replaced with what has been described as the largest and most expensive embassy in the world. The new embassy has been mired in construction delays, but is expected to be completed in 2008."
Re:And if they said this about linux? (Score:5, Informative)
Tagged release/distro = Finished release
There is a difference between always working on a project and releasing crap.
Re:XP SP2! (Score:5, Informative)
I also doubt that Steve meant hardware support when he made that statement. There are more fundamental changes needed.
Re:bashers.... (Score:4, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
A detailed analysis of why Vista should be avoided (Score:2, Informative)
Re:And if they said this about linux? (Score:1, Informative)
No, it isn't. Telling Vista is beta or incomplete is the lightest criticism one could think of.
How about reading a detailed analysis [auckland.ac.nz] certainly not written by fanboys that goes deep and shows how Vista is designed to screw all its users?
MS will not let XP die ... (Score:0, Informative)
No one can doubt that they are very scared of linux and done evrything they can to hinder it.
The last thing they want is to see an OSS version of XP getting a toehold in the OS market.
Re:XP SP2! (Score:5, Informative)
May I present to you my second favorite web site, Mac Fix It [macfixit.com]. Seriously, not everyone has problems with OS X, or XP or Palm or whatever. But as a recent switcher (and I still like Macs and OS X despite the glitches), it's much less stable and problem free than I expected. This is on bolt stock, 99% Apple Certified parts (I added my own HDs to my Mac Pro - they've been fine). Four Mac Books and a Mac Pro (along with a Linux server). The 7.4 Quicktime upgrade hosed Premiere Pro on two machines. I had to back out of the last security fix to get SSH to work again. Now, just as when I was responsible for an XP network, I don't touch an "update" until it's out for a couple of weeks.
YMMV.
Re:The most expensive... (Score:5, Informative)
I have used Vista. I have given it multiple chances. I even gave SP1 another chance. I can't even get audio to play back correctly without sounding corrupted, although in fairness I blame nVidia for lack of Vista support for my motherboard (nForce 2 chipset with integrated audio). Note that I can hate Vista without it being Microsoft's problem, although I hate Microsoft for unrelated Vista problems as well. Don't get me started about gaming performance.
Vista continually underperforms XP every time I try it, and I have never gotten a virus or trojan on XP so Vista's security features are meaningless for me. There's really no contest here. XP wins out for me easily.
I have uncovered various glitches in Explorer and the OS in general which are usually prevalent in ALPHA QUALITY SOFTWARE which, given MS' track record, are unlikely to be fixed until Windows 7 or at least SP2. Hell there are still glitches in XP's explorer which have gone unfixed.
I should also mention I have wrestled with that same audio corruption problem on and off in XP, and it was gone for a bit until I was forced to install new sound drivers to play GTA San Andreas (otherwise I would get BSoDs at the same point in-game) and the problem returned. However, I have NEVER, not ONCE, had an audio corruption problem in Linux. Drivers were picked and installed automatically and I have never had to give a care about them.
Re:that was my reaction (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Vista changed a lot (Score:1, Informative)
Am I now supposed to get my gun and shoot Bill Gates who promised me that it was 64-bit ?
Just fyi: DEC Alpha was a pure 64-bit system. You have been listening to too much Microsoft propaganda.
Re:that was my reaction (Score:5, Informative)
I work as a dev at Microsoft, although I've never worked in the Windows org. Still, I know plenty of development people over there and have heard plenty through the grapevine about what happened with Vista.
It wasn't a victory of marketing over engineering in so much as it was a total failure of engineering and management.
Too many interdependencies, poor project management and Windows' notorious 'cowboy culture' ultimately lead to delays and the cutting of big features like WinFS. What would become Windows Vista was supposed to originally ship in 2003. By 2006, everybody knew that Vista had to be completed so that the nightmare could end and work could begin on the next (hopefully better handled) version. There's a saying at Microsoft that "shipping is a feature". Management cut other features so that Vista could just be done with and ship after 5 years of dragging ass.
Once Vista was pushed out the door, marketing came in and did what they always do--advertise and sell the completed product. Marketing doesn't drive engineering at Microsoft like it might do at other companies. These failures were not about engineers failing to fend off demands from marketing, but rather about engineering from bottom to top scaling back an out of control project enough that it could actually be completed.
Re:The most expensive... (Score:4, Informative)
Vista pre SP1 is definately an early beta. Vista post SP1 isn't that bad - I'd put it down as a reasonable release with a few glitches that still need fixing.. of course it took them a year to get there.
A valid complaint (Score:3, Informative)
There exists hardware where the manufacturer refuses to disclose how it operates. The only purpose for this is to prevent it from working with open systems. The cure is simple. Don't buy it. Do not reward vendors for limiting your choices. In time they'll learn to stop including toxic stuff in their box.
Read the label. In this case, read the specifications for the stuff you buy. If the ingredients aren't on your preferred list of safe ingredients [linux-drivers.org] then just don't buy it. These days there are plenty of vendors eager to brag about how their platform will run any software you want to run including Dell [dell.com], IBM [ibm.com] and HP [hp.com]. In fact if your hardware won't work with an OS so flexible it runs on x86, alpha, sparc, arm, powerpc, hppa, ia64, mips and s390 then it must be truly broken. After all, Linux supports more hardware devices out of the box than any other [makethemove.net].
If they won't tell you what's in the box and you buy it anyway then you're stuck. Fortunately the list of toxic ingredients and their sponsors get shorter every day.
Re:that was my reaction (Score:1, Informative)
Re:And if they said this about linux? (Score:4, Informative)
Geez. I do wish people would get a clue, or at least refrain from trotting this out. What you're describing is the upgrade path marketing campaign sold to retail consumers which has little to do with the actual progression, or what businesses or knowledgable individuals (regrettably not all of the Slashdot crowd) adopted.
There were 2 (two, count 'em) lines of development, simplifed as the following:
DOS -> Win3 -> Win95 -> Win98 -> WinME
NT4 -> NT5.0 (Win200)-> NT5.1 (WinXP) -> NT6 (Vista)
From those two lines, the upgrade path most commonly adopted for desktops was:
DOS -> Win95 -> Win98 > NT5.0 -> NT5.1
Obviously, you can conclude the first line of development died ungracefully. The second line is, well, you decide if if it's dead or dying or just resting. There's a Wiki article [wikipedia.org] on the subject if you're interested in further reading.
Re:that was my reaction (Score:5, Informative)
I can well understand wanting to just make it go away, but if development made the decision to ship a product that simply wasn't ready just to get rid of it, it's WORSE than caving in to pressure from marketing.
So let's recap. "Longhorn", the killer new OS that was going to crush Unix under the weight of it's power and features went into the shredder after several years of hard work because they just couldn't make it fly. Then, the new killer OS lost feature after feature in a desperate attempt to get it out the door. Finally they gave up and just released the thing ready or not (mostly not).
So in that sense, Vista is the culmination of two failed projects in a row. Seven years of work and thay can't even replicate the quality level of their last success. Unless they make some major changes internally and get them just right, Windows 7 isn't looking so good...
Of course, really, Longhorn was the "lowered expectations" of "Blackcomb". It may not be fair to call that the 1st of 3 serial failures in that line since they at least had the sense to scrap that one before it got too far.
Re:that was my reaction (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The most expensive... (Score:3, Informative)
From personal experience: Don't even think about using Vista restore unless you're prepared to have your partitions wiped and nothing restored. Details: Dell Laptop, Vista and XP partitions dual boot.