Steve Ballmer: Slight Chance Windows 7 Could Be Another Vista
Things I didn’t expect to read today, part II: Steve Ballmer saying that the Windows 7 launch could in fact resemble Vista’s very grisly debut:
“‘The test feedback (on Windows 7) has been good, but the test feedback on Vista was good,’ Ballmer, 53, said in an interview last week. ‘I am optimistic, but the proof will be in the pudding.’”
To recap, that’s Steve “I’m going to f—king kill Google” Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft. Admitting Windows 7 could blow up in their faces as badly as Vista.
To be fair, the chances of that happening are very slim. Windows 7 isn’t the giant leap that Vista was from XP, so most stuff works about the same. It actually runs better than Vista on most machines. Everybody involved seems to have their shit together. PC makers are actually ready. There are no dumb, misleading stickers. Drivers, a huge problem last time, look mostly solid, with graphics dudes Nvidia (who was responsible for 30% of Vista crashes in 2007) and ATI getting drivers for Windows 7 out months ago. And, Windows 7 is just really good. (Plus, going to his point this is how most people approach betas nowadays.)
Now I’m just waiting for Steve Jobs to talk about how much he loves the Zune. [Bloomberg via ZDNet]
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HUH? Vista was just a better looking xp???? windows 7 is just a better vista???? Vista wasn’t a giant leap!!!! Maybe for grandma’s who didn’t know what they were doing, for anyone who knows how to use a computer, vista was a logical step up. Hate all these people who didn’t like vista, its just like xp but looks nicer. I bought it on launch day and had far less crashes, experienced no hardware driver probs, couldn’t live without the aero theme, never used xp again.
Vista wasn’t a huge leap to on the surface (it was a rather logical step), but the underlying system was rewritten from the ground up.
Although the core of windows has been re-written a couple of times already (Win98, WinNT/ME, all others were built on these or the original Win1.0 versions), Vista was not only a restructuring of the code base, but the entire philosophy on how the system acts together (though it couldn’t be too drastic so that it still supports older apps). Thus, companies weren’t used to the new driver model that was released, and we got a lot of bad drivers (though I never had a problem with my ATI card).
> but the underlying system was rewritten from the ground up.
hahahahahahahahahahhahahah
*gasp*
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
ok, you may now go to Redmond to get your paycheck
Vista is fantastic. So was XP, Windows 7 and OSX. I have at least one of each in my home.
Vista suffered from a few issues but apart from a few minor bugs (and they must have been minor because I never had ANY issues) these were not the fault of the OS.
Firstly and most importantly, bloggers LOVE bitching about products. Any teething problems and the internet trolls get an instant hard on. Microsoft has the almost unfathomable job of writing an operating system that is a big step forward, planning for future hardware and technology not necessary for XP but then also being compatible with EVERY bit of hardware and associated dodgy device driver that has ever been written to run with XP/Vista. Oh and despite having a f..truck load of new features, it cannot take any more resources because of all the people that are planning to install it on their 486s with 256 meg RAM. Of course the media jumps on these comments as meaning Vista was a huge fail.
UAC’s were also canned while being a brilliant feature. Anyone who knew the first thing about computers knew to disable them but on your Grandma’s computer, leave them on. They’ve evolved and improved in Win7 but maaaann the bloggers canned them.
Finally for many system admins, upgrading to a new operating system means they have new issues to contend with rather than being in their happy place of knowing ins and outs of their entire computers systems. It’s usually the sysadmins that fill the internet with all issues/resolutions. They’re the ones that have to be the guinea pigs to fix issues, find work arounds or post rants on the interweb and wait for Microsoft to patch the problem. It means more work. Sysadmins don’t like work. Work means problems.
So as good as Windows 7 is (and it is fantastic), it’ll still get panned by the bloggers/media/haters and they’ll be just as wrong as the people who still rubbish Vista or the iPhone.
How very well said. I have to say, I agree with you entirely.
HUH? Vista was just a better looking xp???? windows 7 is just a better vista???? Vista wasn’t a giant leap!!!!
Where did you get all that from?
What Matt actually said was that Windows 7 isn’t the giant leap that Vista was from XP. He didn’t say Vista wasn’t a giant leap, or that Vista was just a better looking XP! How about digesting the article before shooting from the hip?