Steve Ballmer Says Microsoft Wasted Time On Vista, And still got it wrong!
“How do you get your product right? How do you help the customer? How do you be patient?” he asked, as if he knew the answer. What he did know was that Microsoft spent too many years building Windows Vista. “We tried too big a task and in the process wound up losing thousands of man hours of innovation,” he said.
What we take him to mean by this that instead of innovating Microsoft sought to make itself into the guardian of digital media – a sort of Internet copyright cop – by stitching up a DRM-infested monster. The attempt fell flat and allowed the likes of Apple and Google to gain a march on the monopolist. Innovation requires risk and not the kind of risks Microsoft took with their Vista debacle. It requires that you do things entirely differently than everyone else. This is not Microsoft. This is not Windows Vista nor Windows 7 nor IE anything. Windows 7 by comparison was released with teams focusing on milestones internally and not releasing or demonstrating any not-done-yet feature.
Essentially each feature that a team proposed was a patchset on the Windows build and they would test it but if it did not make the cut, they didn’t apply the patch to the milestone build. The Engineering Windows 7 blog goes into great detail about the development process that was vastly improved over Windows Vista’s. Change for the sake of change… That’s pretty much the problem Vista had: No reason to use it.
- Win95 was a leap ahead. From DOS and Win3.11. Sure, it was still kinda-sorta DOS-with-some-GUI under the hood, but it was the first time that the whole “DOS stuff” was neatly tucked away, not to be seen by the average user.
- Win98 was the next big leap, a stable Win95, plus a few goodies, better networking, more out-of-the-box support for more hardware, more of everything.
- W2k was the fusion of the NT line with the 9x line, the combination of the “office” and “game” areas, stability and compatibility. Plus USB support for the NT line.
- XP was … well, mostly flashy and gadget-y, but also much easier networking, better (and out of the box) WiFi support, smoother installation and better security (no, really. Not perfect, but certainly better).
- Vista was … well, new. And … well, slower. And … well, why the heck would I wanna use it? Even if I’m just in for the eye candy, Aero is not the big leap ahead in that area (and only available in the more expensive variants no Joe Randomuser ever buys).
You wasted thousands of man-hours of innovation, but not for the reasons you think. You run a company with a long history and well-known culture of quashing real innovation (because, let’s all be honest, Microsoft is big enough with enough smart people working there that real good ideas do see development – they just never seem to see release…). The development teams are so political (with the Office team at the top of the heap, as I understand it) resulting in corporate politics determining what ideas actually make it to market rather than the merits of the actual idea. How many innovative ideas have been canned by internal policy and infighting?
Vista was a dog but let’s not blame Vista for lost man-hours of innovation – look at your corporate culture and you’ll find the problem. Microsoft has no connection whatsoever with their users and thats where their real problem lies. Their users wants their OS to run their applications as good as possible and make managing the computer easy. Microsoft wants the OS to be the users primary application. Jumping up and down in your users face screaming for attention when their primary goal is using their apps arent productive. Until Microsofts leadership realizes their customers are their end users Windows will continue to suck as bad as ever.
Speaking of innovation again, this isn’t something that you see everyday… Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Ubuntu all running simultaneously thanks to VirtualBox and Compiz Fusion.
