

Ballmer: Microsoft wasted time on Vista - rbanffy
http://www.thinq.co.uk/news/2010/5/20/ballmer-microsoft-wasted-time-on-vista/

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j_baker
> "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.

~~~
hga
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.

~~~
j_baker
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.

~~~
hga
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.

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antidaily
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.

~~~
rbanffy
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.

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

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lsb
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?

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kno
Sure they did, as they almost always do.

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ibagrak
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.

~~~
raganwald
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...](http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/05/not-so-big-software-
application.html)

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.

~~~
xpaulbettsx
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.

~~~
raganwald
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?"

~~~
xpaulbettsx
That's a fair criticism

