“Microsoft made one big, wrong decision that led to Vista’s delays, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told financial analysts during his meeting with them last week. The company took a Big Bang approach and tried to overhaul all of its operating system’s core components simultaneously, an approach that eventually led to a fiery development crash,” Stacy Cowley reports for CRN.
“‘We made an upfront decision that was, I’ll say, incredibly strategic and brilliant and wise — and was not implementable,’ Ballmer said. ‘We tried to incubate too many new innovations and integrate them simultaneously, as opposed to letting them bake and then integrating them, which is essentially where we wound up.’ Ballmer’s blunt assessment of Vista’s development problems came in response to analysts’ skepticism about how well Microsoft can execute on its ambitious visions. Cranky about Vista’s protracted incubation and the challenges a company Microsoft’s size faces in trying to fuel continued growth, Wall Street has kept Microsoft’s share price stagnant through most of Ballmer’s six-year reign as the company’s CEO,” Cowley reports.
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “LinuxGuy and Mac Prodigal Son” for the heads up.]
MacDailyNews Take: Seeing how stripped-down PigLipstick is from it’s promised list of features, Windows Vista is really more like XP SP3 with a pseudo Mac OS X theme. We got the headline right with the first try.
Related articles:
PC World writer’s advice for Microsoft: ‘Stop making crap’ – July 27, 2006
Leopard attack on Vista: Apple taunts Microsoft with much faster operating system launches – July 05, 2006
What Microsoft has chopped from Windows Vista, and when – June 27, 2006
Computerworld: Microsoft Windows Vista a distant second-best to Apple Mac OS X – June 02, 2006
translation-
we tried to follow Apple in a complete OS overhaul and implement new innovations like they did but we could not copy everything they did in a reasonable time frame.
You (MDN et al) really like to slam MS on Vista – and rightly so – but be(a)ware: Eventually MS will ship Vista and they are doing the right thing by continuing to delay it so that when it is finally released, it does not experience the pain that XP and other versions have.
Apple has had a huge oportunity here the last three years and unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, Apple has not been able to materially dent the Windows armor. It will be even more difficuly in 2007/8 when Vista is released.
Well, to be fair, Apple adapted an existing operating system, rather than starting from scratch. They also leveraged powerful tools and environments introduced with the acquisition of NeXT. At the end of the day, Steve Jobs has been involved with the evolution of the Mac platform from the day it was born in one way or another.
Nice one gforce. nice to the max.
We made an upfront decision that was, I’ll say, incredibly strategic and brilliant and wise — and was not implementable,’
How could any decision that is not implemetable be considered anything but worthless?
oh yeah, this is microsoft
“We’ll never again do a Windows update this big,”
Hemmmm, wasn’t Vista a completely new OS? A ground-breaking entirely new OS?
Nahhhh, just an XP update. Just a tad bigger than SP2 but enough to have Microsoft to their knees. Next, trim down to an update that they can manage and they’ll meet shipment date of XP SP2, aka Vista.
@me
I believe it wasn’t Apple’s goal to make a dent in the Windows platform for the past three years. That’s only been their goal for the past 6 months, and the dent is very noticeable. The previous 2 1/2 years were spent preparing for that.
How “incredibly strategic and brilliant and wise” can a descision be when it is unimplementable?
Maybe Balmer and company need to consult their paperclips about the definitions of those terms.
I cant wait for next weeks headline; Balmer Hangs himself
nah he wouldnt do that, he’s got too much money, I could see him going even MOAR crazy than he already is tho.
“We made an upfront decision that was, I’ll say, incredibly strategic and brilliant and wise — and was not implementable.”
BBWWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!
I just took an incredibly satisfing and brilliant dump—-and it was not flushable.
Ballmer: ‘We tried to incubate too many new innovations and integrate them simultaneously
He actually meant: ‘We tried to COPY too many new innovations and integrate them simultaneously
And who made that mistake, the Chief-Software architect?
You guys are really missing the subtlety in Balmer’s comment. He is poking fun at MS with this comment.
me, you said: You (MDN et al) really like to slam MS on Vista – and rightly so – but be(a)ware: Eventually MS will ship Vista and they are doing the right thing by continuing to delay it so that when it is finally released, it does not experience the pain that XP and other versions have.
This is wishful thinking on your part that MS has learned ANY lessons and/or changed its corporate culture.
Apple has had a huge oportunity here the last three years and unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, Apple has not been able to materially dent the Windows armor. It will be even more difficuly in 2007/8 when Vista is released.
Apple *has* made dents, big ones. Erosion of the Windows base – a huge base – is happening slowly and steadily.
OK, i’ve got this idea of being able to fly, be invisable, and a bunch of other “incubating” ideas that are bad ass. but I was not able to get the kinks worked out, but it was still, Bad Ass!
Byaaaahh
Coolfactor: Make note that neither OS X nor Vista are brand new OS’s. OS X did use BSD Unix and the NEXT OS, and Vista really is the same old Windows with a new dress on.
i’ve been using a recent build of vista. it’s nice and is clearly superior to XP and is not XP SP 3.
apple is great at building what they can accomplish and getting those innovations into OSX on time.
microsoft bit off more than they can choose. ballmer isn’t exactly wrong on this.
i know many microsofties. they are smart, talented young people.
the next version of office is superb.
and i love my mac, i just don’t look at MS as a bunch of losers. they aren’t.
they have grade B products with grade A business execution.
but their products are getting better. i think that they will get stronger in the future, not weaker.
apple could end up owning the consumer market much more so than it does now whereas MS can own the business market. it makes sense to me.
When you think of the massive money and people resources that Microsoft has to work with, it’s incredible that the tale of Longhorn-Vista has evolved/devolved into such an incredible mess.
Also, taking into account the developers and companies Microsoft has crushed in order to gain their current position, it’s even more incredible.
WHY don’t they just FIRE Balmer? CLEARLY, he’s unable to do his job effectively.
Bottom line?
It’s karma. The evil Microsoft has done is coming back to bite them.
To be fair, there’s not much to compare between Vista and OS X. The article shows Ballmer’s idiocy when he says Vista’s goals was “… an upfront decision that was, I’ll say, incredibly strategic and brilliant and wise — and was not implementable.”
“incredibly strategic and wise?” Except it didn’t work. So how great could it be? And since it’s not here and years late, and relegated to XP SP 3 status, it’s still a turd. It’s an incredibly strategic and brilliant and wise… turd. But still a turd.
OS X as we know it was about five or six years in development but Apple did it one piece at a time and made it work. Remember, Apple bought NeXT in late 1996, Jobs took over in mid-1997 and OS X wasn’t worth a crap until Jaguar in 2002. That’s a lotta development time to get to where OS X is today. And Apple didn’t exactly start from scratch since NeXT already had a highly touted OS.
What Apple did with development of OS X was a brilliant strategy. And wise. And implementable. Add to that the Carbon layer to run OS 9 applications alongside OS X, the Cocoa and Xcode layers for rapid application development and cross platform (PPC and Intel) development and you can see that Apple was preparing for the future while shoring up the company’s financials AND launching a whole new product category in the iPod and iTMS.
In other words, over the past nearly 10 years, Apple executed well, and continues to improve. In the meantime, Microsoft’s execution has only become worse.
Better yet, MSFT has to buy back their own stock to the tune of billions of dollars just to keep it from falling through the floor. The empire is falling, folks.
Tera Patricks
Mac360
microsoft bit off more than they can *chew*
typo…
macosrumors.com is DOWN forced or not im not sure.
Aren’t most corporations still on Win2K?? Maybe the laptops have XP but every large company I’ve visted is still using Win2K on their desktops…. hell they don’t even want you to have a CD drive…
I don’t understand how he can talk about Vista’s delays as thought they were in the past. Like, “Yeah, that was rough getting that thing to market, but now that’s it’s been released, we can analyze what went wrong and what we did right along the way.” As far as I can tell, the beast is still caged.
Boy this is sure telling…
“Wall Street has kept Microsoft’s share price stagnant through most of Ballmer’s six-year reign as the company’s CEO”
I wonder just what Ballmer has on Gates?
In any other company Ballmer whould have been long gone!
And to say that he F–ked Up on their major #1 product is adding fuel to the fire!
If I was a major stockholder I would be pissed and really vocal about either he goes today or my money goes – bottom line!
A little off topic but I’m curious as to what people think.
Imagine if MS had a complete shake-up of management. And started on a completely new OS, like Apple did with OS X.
Which woud be better?
Discuss