Ballmer: Microsoft wasted time on Vista | Hacker News Reader

Ballmer: Microsoft wasted time on Vista

thinq.co.uk

12 pointsrbanffy18 comments

> "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.

That's a non-sequitur, and borderlines on putting words into Ballmer's mouth. I don't see any way to construe Balmer's quote as being about DRM.

Yeah, that's really bad, any Microsoft watcher worth his salt should know that the "too big a task" they tried was a Windows rewrite on top of .NET.

Perhaps a good idea in principle but .NET was too young at the time; in general their inital goals were was too much as well as too soon. That cost them a couple or so years and then put them under immense time pressure.

I don't think this is it. This was a research project that was undertaken with the express knowledge that it probably wouldn't be immediately useful. It was an attempt to see what components of an OS might be able to be moved to .Net.

I'm thinking more along the lines of the "filesystem is a database" idea they had.

Well ... what was it that they did totally scrap two years into the project, restarting with a Windows Server code base?

WinFS was part of the the general Longhorn set of projects, but I didn't get the impression it was inextricably linked to the Longhorn next version of Windows project.

I remember being excited about Longhorn. Had they launched a RC like they did for Windows 7, they might have avoided the debacle that was Vista.

It's not that hard to get excited after you watch something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPDT21oEhW0

At that time, it looked like they had something that would humiliate the competition.

I had not completed my transition over to Linux at that time and considered, seriously, sticking to Windows.

Seriously, 7 years later and it still looks great. Too bad they couldn't deliver that.

They did have an RC though, or at least a beta (which couldn't have been that restricted).

They did and I ran it for 3 months before giving up and going back to XP, it was rather painful.

Though, it was a "Death by 1000 paper cuts" sort of situation with vista.

Will their mobile browser strategy be another Vista, giving an enormous head start to Webkit's version of HTML5 while not producing much value intrinsically?

Sure they did, as they almost always do.

What awful slide in the background of that pic! So many words, so little meaning. I can only imagine that this had to be compensated by some pretty compelling delivery.

Nicely picked up.

Microsoft overreached with Vista, but I believe they've overreached with many other things.

Joel Spolsky wrote a great essay on Microsoft's 'Fire and Motion' where they simply keep building new and deprecating old apis. How do you ship and support software against such a fast-moving target?

The only way to win is to walk away.

If you want to play in Microsoft's ecosystem, you have to correctly pick which APIs and products you will support (and code against) and which ones you think will be dropped before you recoup your investment.

While working at a MS "solution provider" I had the task of building a large NGO hosting service on top of IIS, Site Server, Exchange and SQL Server. I was not allowed to use Apache or any other non-Microsoft alternative.

I can only imagine the nightmare it would be (for our client) to port it to newer versions of whatever came after Site Server 3.

That same solution provider whole heartedly embraced WebClasses when they were announced, but that happened after I left.

So little meaning? How about:

"Attracting talented employees; making balanced investments; innovating in the right areas, maintaining a positive product flow and making the right future bets."

Sorry for the meretricious linking, but some time ago I wrote about The Not-So-Big Software Design:

http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/05/not-so-big-software-appl...

My thesis was that a good design was about the specifics of the problem and the client, not about generics that could be applied to any project. I feel the same way about business plans.

What's specific to Microsoft about this list? In what way are these the right objectives for Microsoft but not for Apple, General Motors, or Heroku?

Ballmer doesn't call me up telling me how to blather on the Internet, so I won't tell him how to blather to reporters.

But I will warn him: Steve, if I'm ever interviewing you and you give me this list, I won't meekly transcribe your Motherhood and Apple Pie platitudes, I'll follow-up by asking you what's specific to Microsoft about these items that couldn't apply to anyone. I'll ask you what's special about your leadership that you could identify these priorities, and how you differ from some B.Comm. intern that would mouth much the same list if I asked them what Microsoft needs to do to succeed.

And I guarantee, that SteveB would have specific, detailed answers about each of those - even though he often doesn't come off great in the press, in person he's an extremely sharp individual, and the depth to which he could tell you about each of those pillars is far more than he shows in a press conference.

Well then, there's something extremely broken about the business culture that he can't, won't, or shouldn't be more specific.

especially given that one of the pillars is attracting talent. Are talented people really reading this stuff he says and getting excited about working at Microsoft? Or are they assuming (possibly incorrectly) that it is just another BigCo where everything is doublespeak and generic talk that means nothing except "I want to look good so I can get my bonus this year?"

That's a fair criticism

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