Ballmer Calls Vista 'A Work In Progress'

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."

The most expensive...

...beta software I've ever heard of.

Re:The most expensive...

Beta? More like EARLY alpha software! What I don't get is how in the hell they can get away with charging customers over $300 in some cases to alpha test this shit for them. Wonder if this comment will come around to bite him in his big sweaty monkey ass. Wonder if he will yell and scream and jump around then or just throw another chair.

Re:

No, I'd say after using Vista for a few months that it's probably a reasonable first or second beta release. Most things work, but it's the annoying bugs (like the constant disk use which kills laptop battery life).

At the end of the day, other than a few

Re:

Maybe Ballmer can re-invent himself as a caber tosser after his company collapses. I understand he's good at throwing heavy things, and he's definitely a tosser...

Re:that was my reaction

You're right that software is never done, but considering the revelations of what was happening in the final months before Vista's release, even die-hard Microsoft apologists have to admit that it was a victory of marketing over engineering that got an operating system like Vista through the starting gate. It wouldn't be so bad if it was labeled that way. I've installed bleeding-edge Linux kernels in the past out of pure curiousity, but never in my wildest dreams would I dare throw one on a production server or on to someone's PC.

That's exactly what happened with Vista. It simply wasn't ready, and worse, it appears that the backroom way which Microsoft works with major hardware companies even knocked it back a few notches. It's not surprising to me, as I had heard some rumblings long before the revelations a few months ago. The marketers wanted an operating system ASAP, the teams didn't think it was ready, but the marketers won, and now Microsoft's credibility has fallen through the floor. Even worse, for most people, there's no point to the upgrade. As awful as it sounds to the marketers in Redmond, and maybe even to a lot of FOSS fanatics, Windows XP is a stable, mature product that works properly on today's hardware.

But Microsoft doesn't survive on stable, mature products. It survives on its unholy hardware alliances and marketing department, which push for unrealistic (and pointless) upgrade cycles. The problem here is that Vista is a resource hog. They say 1gb of RAM should be enough, but I can tell you that Aero runs, but does not run all that well, on 1gb of RAM. Only now are we seeing what I would consider legitimately sufficient hardware being released that runs the Vista "experience".

But it doesn't end there. Rather than admitting that Vista was a disaster, Microsoft still appears determined to kill XP, despite the fact that most business and many consumers don't want Vista. The only reason the operating system can even be considered a success is because of Microsoft's long-standing darling, the OEMs.

Here's a tip to Microsoft. Keep XP on the shelves. You're stuck with supporting Vista, but maybe Windows 7 will be an improvement, but only if a) you refuse to take hardware vendor's calls when they demand support for their low-end shit and b) fire 9/10s of marketing department, they're the incompetent evil morons that have created this disaster, and they should be shown the door. As well, as a sort of sub-point to that, the developments should always win automatically against marketing demands. Vista may have been released six months late, but you wouldn't have the black eye you have now.

Re:And if they said this about linux?

HEAD/source code = Work in progress
Tagged release/distro = Finished release

There is a difference between always working on a project and releasing crap.

Re:

There's a difference between "Work in progress" and "Oh bugger, that's broken."

Re:And if they said this about linux?

I wouldn't be so sure. Linux is something that's more ambiguous than Windows is - Windows is a packaged, supposedly complete product that costs real money (a lot of it), is extremely widespread, and most importantly to your point, used by almost everyone in North America at some point in their lives - Which, in essence, means that Ma, Pa and Uncle Tusky are alpha/beta testers. And they're paying for it.

Linux is at its core a community effort, rather than a commercial product (though many have been made from it). As such, it is constantly changing and evolving, and is quite difficult to "keep up" with for most who aren't enthusiasts (Windows version upgrades gives most people a hard time to begin with). There exist shiny, polished distros like Ubuntu and Fedora that are meant to be a "whole product", being almost literally a snapshot of stable, tested software bundled with a stable version of the kernel, but these OSes are generally non-profit or free (as in both these cases).

The core difference between them at first glance is that Windows costs money. Coupled with what Ballmer went on record with in TA, that basically means that Microsoft doesn't consider Vista a "complete" product as yet, but has no problem charging inordinate amounts of money for the privilege of running it. That said, my experiences with Ubuntu in the past have always been a lot more polished than my experiences in Windows, and I would consider Windows to be an inferior product on most days. I still use Windows XP (my X-Fi doesn't yet have a driver for Ubuntu and Wine still isn't perfect), but I doubt I'll be making a jump to Vista "Just Because". There don't seem to be any compelling reasons to make the change (aside from having Aero and DX10 support, the latter of which won't run on my system and the former of which is a memory hog for a decrease in desktop CPU usage), and a lot of people feel the same way - Even Joe and Jane Average.

Another difference between Windows and Linux is that while the Linux kernel itself may be in perpetual development (as is the general mindset of Linux), this is because it falls under a different development model than the Microsoft mindset. Linux' greatest trait is that it IS in perpetual development - Because this is desired and necessary. For Microsoft, it's supposed to be one spit-shined, heavily-tested operating system every few years. A different model; Not necessarily better or worse, but different, more similar to Mac OS and most traditional software development cycles. In this model, however, being in a state of perpetual development is something that is absolutely catastrophic, because as with the XP->Vista jump, more development time is spent fixing holes and bugs in the previous generation of software to bring it up to spec than is spent working on the next big release. This is what we're looking at with Vista, which Ballmer confirmed.

The very fact that most of the more impressive features of Windows Vista (hi, WinFS!) were ripped from it later on in its development stunted its ability to really compete against even its own predecessor, and for me, cast doubt upon its legitimacy as a valid entry in the product line.

Re:

Face it, if linus stated this everyone would triumph it as showing that linux moved with the times, and was better than monolithic old vista.

If Linus made this statement about Linux, it would be within the context of operating systems whose kernels and other low level components have an established history of successful upgrades with minimal negative impacts on userland. However I doubt that

Re:

This is a poor, half assed attempt to bash microsoft by the fanboys.

I don't know if I'd call Ballmer a fanboy. He is the CEO after all, and he would certainly know how bad Vista is. If anyone has the right to bash MS, it's him.

I don't think you can com

God forbid...

They work all those problematic details out before release.

interesting

So.. basically by implication he admits they released an unfinished project that they knew was bloatware?

Well we knew it, buts its nice of him to admit it. (Bet MS PR just loves him)

:-)

So...

This means Vista is still in development development development development?

Re:

And we are all betatesters as usual.

As usual - and nothing surprising. The worst thing is that we are more or less forced into Vista unless we go to Linux, FreeBSD or AROS.

Software "architects?" Ha!

If builders built buildings the way Microsoft writes code... well, we'd have the US embassy in Iraq.

Re:

Read the article you linked...

"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,

That's great Steve.

Now please explain the hefty price tag for your unfinished product.

Translation, please?

OK, I've read that quote (from the summary) over a few times and I have not a single clue what Ballmer is trying to say. Would someone please translate that in to something resembling a sentence for me?

Re:Translation, please?

Marketing translation: "Like any other release, there are occasional issues, but we're working to resolve those issues."

Real-world translation: "It's buggy bloatware, but it's our buggy bloatware, and if I catch you even thinking about another operating system I'll start throwing furniture again."

Hope that helps.

In Other Words

It is a failure. Why not just name the child by its real name?

XP SP2!

We didn't know it at the time but XP pre-SP2 sucked. When Vista reaches SP2 it'll probably be decent (from an average persons point of view - for me it already works absolutely fine). By then Windows 7 will be out and I'll be one of the people sticking with Vista for SP3 and go to 7 when it's SP1 comes out.
Linux and Windows both suffer from the same issue: theres so much variety of hardware out there that you just can't write it perfect for everything right off-the-bat so you need to release and incrementally improve. Mac's suffer less from this situation as Apple rules their hardware configuration with an iron fist - which is the source of their mythical "it just works®".

Re:

Linux and Windows both suffer from the same issue: theres so much variety of hardware out there that you just can't write it perfect for everything right off-the-bat so you need to release and incrementally improve. Mac's suffer less from this situation as

5-year release cycle

He also admitted that the 5-year release cycle wasn't a good idea

Windows was complete when NT 4.0 came out in 1996 -- 32-bit pre-emptive multitasking with a normal user interface (i.e. no Program Manager). With the possible exception of Active Directory, everything else could have been a service pack or patch: USB, WiFi, CD-R. When the calendar drives a release schedule rather than needed features, Microsoft is not only acting just to fill its coffers, but it costs companies massive admin overhead.

Ballmer is right -- it shouldn't be a five-year release cycle. It should be 10 years. 64-bit is a good reason to have a new release after NT 4.0.

640k or ram is all anyone will ever need...

... There was a time when hardware resources were limited and expensive and programmers programmed accordingly and software was faster and easier to use in ways it is no longer easy.

Granted applications have become more integrated thru the operating system improvements but as technology and its use changes from the mainframe to the cell phone, the cycle of programming should be moving from the packrat (use all the memory and resources you can in your application) back to compactness of providing the right functionality only.

Where does this put Ballmers statement?

He is in essence saying MS will remain stupidly behind the times while claiming to be the forefront.

As the user base becomes more and more adapted to computing in a second nature manner, the more and more the user base will perceive the obvious babel of MS and as such move to alternatives for which third party commercial development will not be able to ignore and stay in business.

And we all know from experience that this is not going to happen over night but more at the rate of evolution via human generations, where each generation will put up with the babel less and less.

Vista changed a lot

There are reasons the earlier versions of Vista sucked, and like Balmer said, are still work in progress. To summarise the three main points I see:

-Actual security (UAC); breaking a shed-load of applications that would write to C:\Windows and think nothing of it

-64 bit. It's the first serious consumer Windows that's 64 bit. XP 64 bit is rare at best; Win2003 isn't for consumers.

-New driver architecture. Video, audio, and network driver stack has been re-written from the ground up after nearly 10 years to being more or less the same. New changes are worthwhile too; a bad video driver should (in theory) never be able to bring a system crashing down like in XP, for instance.

All these things had to be done; all these things broke stuff. They are massive and necessary changes, and in the long run will pay off, but in the short run have been a bit of a system-shock.

Things are changing though; but Vista has been as much a change from XP under the hood as 98 -> 2000 migration was in my opinion.