Looking back on the Longhorn days, it seemed that so many things were tried; different UI changes were being tossed around. Things like WinFS never even made into Vista’s final code. It was sort of the “spaghetti” scenario: throw a lot of stuff at the wall and see what sticks. Only the thing that stuck was the negative perception that Vista was a huge failure.
For many of us, we saw Vista as a failure in some respects, but also as a stepping stone for the success of Windows 7. Like it or not, Windows 7 is largely the result of improvements and lessons-learned from Windows Vista. Improvements like Windows Search and the aero interface made it out of the disaster, while other improvements were made to features like the UAC because of user-complaints and Apple’s “bash Vista” commercials.
Microsoft and Ballmer aren’t fooled by Windows 7’s great success. They know what they had to go through to get here, Vista. In a meeting with fellow business leaders, Baller spoke on the Vista debacle,
“Just not executed well. Not the product itself, but we went a gap of about five, six years without a product,”…”I think back now and I think about thousands of man-hours, and it wasn’t because we were wrong-minded in thinking bad thoughts and not pushing innovation. We tried too big a task, and in the process wound up losing essentially thousands of man-hours of innovation capabilities.”
Microsoft learned quickly that general, mid-range hardware and average users weren’t ready to make such a jump and after billions of dollars spent, the lesson was all too painful. Fast forward to 2009 and now Microsoft has learned from its past mistakes. Users were ready to ditch their XP interface for something with a fresh look and practical feel. Hardware and software manufacturers had finally caught up to the requirements of the new OS and the Windows code had been streamlined to take advantage of such advancements.
What came from the mess of Longhorn/Vista was the fast, easy-to-use, more secure OS that most of us use today. Whether is was aiming too high, moving too fast or being to broad, Vista will always have its place in the tech history books as the OS that let (most) everyone down.
Hopefully, we won’t have to go through these growing pains again with Windows 8, I don’t expect to, but with any progress, usually comes a few lessons.
Source: Seattle PI: The Microsoft Blog
The problem is that Microsoft doesn’t see Vista as a failure. We all Know that part of solving any problem would be easily by identifying this problem. Unfortunately, Ballmer doesn’t admit this, but Ballmer himself knows that Vista was a big mistake. Don’t be obstinate, but be responsive to your problems, or you will find out that you lost your market share.
Vista wasn’t a failure. The timing was a failure. Here’s what happened.
Back in the XP days, most PCs had 256mb, 512mb, and 1gb of RAM. That RAM was good enough to run XP but when Vista came out some people installed it on their old PCs and found it slow and said it was crap etc etc. Since Vista went out people upgraded their PCs. So now we have PCs with 2gb-4gb RAM and 7 runs fast on them.
Now that you have a PC with 2gb-4gb RAM give Vista a try. It is not crap – Your PC was.
Agree with Daniel. I had, what I assumed to be, a very decent machine at the time of Vista’s launch and it worked decently, but that was a good AMD CPU and 1.5GB’s of RAM with a 9600GT video card. However, that same machine did run Windows 7 even better, so while there was a hardware disconnect with Vista’s release, there is no question that Window 7 does a better job with the same and even older hardware.
vista as (an os) was a win by microsoft – it brought a lot of new stuff to the table.. but, at the same time, the hardware manufacturers failed to deliver drivers to it which was the reason for (most, and if not) all those BSODs (remember the BSODs caused by nvidia drivers? i sure do..)
anyways.. lets say that i make a hog of a os.. does it make my pc crap (although all other oss run fine on it), or the os?
the responsibility for vista being ditched by many is not only microsoft’s fault..
Don’t forget drivers as well. When Vista shipped the drivers for devices were incomplete, slow and buggy. Everyone who tried Vista has problems. 3 years later, Win 7 ships using the drivers that have now all been fixed for Vista and everyones experience is better. Beyond that, you have systems that have been upgraded, applications made better compatible and the move to 64-bit. No doubt, Windows 7 is better, but Vista helped is making that happen.
This may be the first time a company ever shot itself in the foot by aiming too high!