You might have thought Windows Vista was a finished product. But Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer last week described his company’s newest operating system as “a work in progress.”
According to a report in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Ballmer told a professional gathering in that city that the product has gotten “a lot of things right,” but “we have a lot of things we need to learn from.” While acknowledging complaints about the new OS, Ballmer also said the company has a fair share of satisfied users.
Never Again
One of those lessons to be learned, he said, is not to go five years between releases of an OS — the time from the release of Windows XP to Vista. “We can’t ever let that happen again,” he said. Earlier this month, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates made a point of noting during a conference that Vista’s successor, currently called Windows 7, will be completed within a year.
This admission of less than completeness comes at a difficult time for Vista, which was first released in January 2007. Earlier this month, analysts from industry research firm Gartner said the Windows franchise and Vista in particular were in danger of collapsing.
Gartner analysts Neil MacDonald and Michael Silver, speaking at a conference, echoed many of the complaints Microsoft has been hearing from consumers and businesses. They cited development times for Windows releases that were too long, especially in relation to the innovation delivered, and the failure to deliver a consistent experience between platforms.
MacDonald and Silver also cited compatibility issues and the substantial hardware requirements to run Vista. And they predicted that, by 2011, there will be more operating system-agnostic applications in the market, notably those hosted on the Internet. This will diminish the dominant position Windows has held for decades, they said.
‘Got That Right’
Some consumers…