Steve Ballmer: Longhorn-Vista was the "single biggest mistake I made
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No.
Sorry, but next to 7 and 8, I'd say Vista is another OS that Microsoft got right, but ruined it for themselves by not listing to there customers.
Vista like 8, needed people to just learn a few new things (UAC for eg) and just like 8 and its metro titles, Vista was just plain annoying until it (UAC) was switched off.
Once the performance issues were ironed out, Vista was a fully perfect OS and much needed upgrade to XP and i kinda wished MS just waited out the storm with all the complaints (as they're doing with 8) and spent more time on Vista, thus having Win7 come out at a later time and being an even more of an upgrade, rather than just being Vista with a few new bells and whistles.
Still have Vista installed on a second HDD, i go back to it every now and then if i cant be bothered reinstalling something on my 7 partition.
Vista was great, and far better than any previous version ms has released since before... once the kinks were ironed out, just like Win8.
Nono06
+1. The problem was also that Vista was targeting new hardware and people running XP on old machine was disappointed by the performance.
I only used Vista on a new configuration at that time and nothing was wrong from performance point of view.
gUNN1993
See all I remember Vista doing for the 3 odd years I was using it was crashing repeatedly and not being able to tab out of processes.
In fact I remember defending it to my friend who was still on XP, then upgrading to 7 and within 3 days messaging him to say that I was totally wrong and vista was so awfully terrible by comparison that I was probably wrong about it being better than XP by extension.
But then again, it's been so damn long since I used XP I can't remember if that was any good as well, all I can think about is how much better 7 is than vista.
stone-eye
Vista was fine, never had a problem with it as ive had decent hardware. 7 was essentially Servicepack 3 for Vista.
I think Ballmers biggest mistake was taking windows 8 and not giving users the choice on their interface. The OS is nice but forcing the tablet specific UI parts and everything down everyones throat was a mistake, theyve rectified that partly with 8.1 but theres still alot of annoyances in win 8.1 that just shouldnt be there.
Nothing Ballmer did will ever be as bad as Windows ME.
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windows me. holly crap.
I remember making dbz music video on ME using movie maker. The audio would pop after a few replays when testing vid/audio sync and the only way too fix was to save, exit and reload.
ME, wow, got into q3a along with mods for it(bid for power, anyone?) and playing snes games for the first time. IBM 667mhz intel celeron and 64mb of ram, 20gb hdd.
The memories.
ME was ****.
TheDeeGee
I had Vista 64-Bit XtremeGamer Version for quite a while, never caused problems.
Pill Monster
This is true, Longhorn was his biggest mistake [spoiler]until he outdid himself once again with W8. 😀 [/spoiler]
Vista 32 chugged along like a slow moving train. Longhorn also lacked decent driver support from hardware vendors....
PNeV
When I first got my Q6600 and 4GB of RAM, I went over to Vista x64 and I had zero problems with it. It was faster in my opinion than XP and never crashed or suffered performance issues. I never understood the hate, mainly by those who upgraded from XP to it. Either they did it wrong or they did it on older spec XP machines. I always thought Vista was designed for new PCs at the time?
Pill Monster
Yeah the 64bit version wasn't too bad but most systems (nearly all OEM) had Vista 32. And it was a DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOG.
The other single biggest complaint from users was UAC.
I've personally witnessed office workers jumping from high rise buildings after the "do you wish to allow this change" dialogue box appeared one time too many.
True story. And very sad.
sirrith
GFWL is a bigger mistake.
Denial
Xbox was able to compete with rival consoles within 2 generations. It also spurred a number of significant changes in terms of multiplayer interface design on the consoles. Something tells me Ballmer is probably pretty happy with xbox.
Yeah a minor annoyance with a product that probably effects less than hundred million people is a bigger mistake than Microsoft's multi-billion dollar product having god awful sales and tarnishing brand reputation.
Extraordinary
That interview was months ago, I remember reading he said that way before November
EDIT - August
http://www.wpcentral.com/microsoft-ceo-steve-ballmer-biggest-regret-windows-vista
NAMEk
He is The biggest mistake.
Andrew LB
Vista was an absolute piece of junk until SP1 came out which fixed a ton of the issues. Those of you who liked vista had obviously not used the unpatched original version.
nhlkoho
The unpatched original version was not that bad if you had a powerful machine.
sykozis
I had Vista installed on launch day and had fewer issues with it than I did from XP at launch. My memory of XP may be a bit tainted due to my overall experience with it though.
Extraordinary
I had problems with Vista from start to finish, hated that OS with a passion
Same machine with Windows 7, no issues
In fact, the pre-release leaks of Win 7 solved 90% of the issues I had with Vista
yelsewshane
He is wrong the big mistake is windows 8 8.1
Fender178
To Be Honest Mr Ballmer your biggest mistake was not Windows Vista its Windows 8. Also The problem with Vista was the lack of drivers. And performance issues which SP1 fixed.
JulesCools
Um no. Vista was buggy, but it wasn't plain ridiculous the way that 8 is. You can fix bugs, you can't fix the whole UI system of Win 8. It needs to be trashed
