Ballmer: We Wasted Too Many Years on Vista

I still haven't seen any reason for an operating system after Windows 2000. All they do is move things to different locations, make the operating system slower and take more memory, and make things buggier.

It would be nice if they just settled down and got rid of bugs, and made the OS very stable and fast, instead of adding features no one asks for, or wants. They come with a price - slower speed and bugs, that seems a little high for lack of benefit.

But, then, they don't get extra money for just releasing faster, less-buggy versions of the same operating system.

Yeah Vista wasn't too hot, but windows 7 came from vista, and 7 is pretty darn-tooting-good.

windows vista wasnt that bad but im glad they moved on.

I disagree! Windows7 is what it is thanks to the time and money invested into Vista. I bypassed Vista by going from XP straight to 7 but I used Vista at work and I despised it (not due to the hate hype, but because it really is a bad OS), but now I totally dig 7 and that's thanks to the Vista growing pains.

Good luck running SSD with Windows2000 - oh and I'm sure you're having a blast with drivers for SLI, etc. How's your quad-core CPU working out for you? I'm sure it's blazing fast running Photoshop CS5 with the...err...Windows2000 and 512mb ram you are using? Give me a break!

I have two laptops of same spec, I formatted one with Win7, the other with a Vista SP2 DVD... Suprisingly there isn't a noticable speed difference between the two. I have a desktop (much more powerful/more mem) with Vista installed using a DVD with no SP's, and installed the SP after install... Now thats running slooooooooooooooow!

Perhaps installing Service Packs after Windows is installed is what contributed to this slow behavior. Guess we wait till Win7 SP1 to test my theory.

He is totally right. I have no idea what they were doing for this long.

I personally went straight from XP to 7. Win 7 is better at many things (also, is worse at some things), but it is definitely NOT 10 years of work better than XP. I cannot imagine any other company working for 10 years and getting only this far. Look what Apple did in 10 years, what Google did in 10 years, think where Intel was 10 years ago. This is NOT 10 years of work for a company the size of MS. Sorry.

"I bypassed Vista by going from XP straight to 7 but I used Vista at work and I despised it (not due to the hate hype, but because it really is a bad OS), but now I totally dig 7 and that's thanks to the Vista growing pains."

Your an idiot and its most certainly because of the hype. After service pack two Vista was a fine OS and still is. 7 is also much better but ill take SP2 Vista over any XP any day.

Calling someone an idiot and you can't even get "you're" and "your" right.

/facepalm

I agree with IFLATLINEI. Vista may have not been the best product when it was released but got more polished with time. Of course, when OSX first came out it was sluggish even on new hardware, incompatible with OS 9 and had a horrible adoption rate at first but now is the only (logical) thing that separates a Mac from a generic PC. Windows 7 is of the same cloth as Vista especially after sp2.

On the other hand I think Linus Torvalds once said that an OS should be nothing more than a transparent gateway to you applications and if that is the case then every OS is becoming way to bloated. Although I may agree with Linus about that statement in a perfect world I still want my eye candy.

Edit: I agree with his opinion about Vista and Win7, not calling someone a mentally deficient person because their opinion differs or are ignorant to specific facts.

"Ballmer gave himself a pat on the back, however: the Xbox consoles hit the nail on the head in regards to racking in gaming-based revenue."

A thousand monkeys with a thousand hammers will eventually hit the nail on the head too. After the RRoD mess I would hate to see Ballmer trying to build a house. How many billions of USD did they blow on faulty hardware?

You haven't figured out by now that these would be easy to add to Win2K, and didn't need a new operating system?

You didn't know that Windows NT was always for multiple CPUs? You really did know that the operating systems are made pretty modular, and drivers are separate, and you could make them work with Windows 2000? You really didn't know?

As far as I can tell Windows 7 is Vista. The overall color scheme is more bluish instead of blackish. There are a couple fewer UAC notifications, but still too many. There is a new window snapping feature, which is good for two or fewer windows. A new task bar that can show only one icon for all application windows, but you only get two size choices (small and large) And finally, games seem to crash a bit less often.

That's it. That's my review of Windows 7. If you wan't to experience a truly better OS, then you have to get a Mac. Snow Leopard is years ahead of Windows Vista 2.0, oops I mean 7.

"You haven't figured out by now that these would be easy to add to Win2K, and didn't need a new operating system?"

Idiot, what do you think XP was? It was only a tweaked version of 2000 with an improved interface along with other improvements.

"You didn't know that Windows NT was always for multiple CPUs? You really did know that the operating systems are made pretty modular, and drivers are separate, and you could make them work with Windows 2000? You really didn't know?"

You didn't know that Windows XP, Vista, and 7 are based on the Windows NT kernel? You didn't know that the modularity you speak of is how they don't switch to a completely new kernel every time a new OS is released? You didn't know that the driver model introduced with Vista is superior to that of Windows 2000? You didn't know how to use proper grammar? You didn't know you fail?

Agreed...

Grammar police anyone?

What about those who regret investing in Windows Vista? Aren't they the one's suffering the most in all this?

...And Microsoft wants them to pay AGAIN for Windows 7? (Which is really, in all intents and purposes, an improved version of Windows Vista.)

Windows Vista SHOULD HAVE been Windows 7.

@TA152H: So I assume you're still using Windows 2000 on all your machines up to now?

Why bother tinkering with an old OS just to make things work when you could make it work outright using a newer OS? This is pointless. The wheel is already created, just need some optimizations to make it work better. Do not suggest to creating another wheel from scratch using old bricks.

You have got to be kidding me. why would I want to by overpriced hardware just to run a Mac OSX? I tried OSX on a hackintosh to to see what it was like. HATED IT. Granted I tried OSX 10.5.8 on a Dell Optiplex 745 quad core with 4 GB ran. It ran ok. Not fast, not slow, just OK. That is when I discovered you can’t do jack on a Mac except download crap to your IPod. Adobe CS... Yea runs better on a windows box. You still need Microsoft office for Mac if you want to use it in a corporate environment and that doesn’t have Outlook, it has some basterdized thing call Entourage. Granted the next version will finally have outlook. But even then you’re still stuck MS to get anything done, or you have to run boot camp. don’t even get me started on iWork. It is worse than MS Works Suite. Bottom line is Mac's are overpriced and the OS is useless. Now be for you call me an MS fanboy, I use Linux (and OSS office programs)all the time. SUSE is one of the finest operating systems out there. It is rock solid stable, and has tons of apps out of the box. In fact most Linux Operating systems are so far ahead of Mac OSX its unreal, which surprises me because OSX is based on BSD. Only Jobs dumbed it down for people stupid enough to overpay hardware just to upload crap to their IPod or IPad. Hell, I would rather have Vista, Windows ME, or even 3.11 than OSX.

Geithner a CEO? I thought he was just a tax cheater.

I guess you're too stupid to get it. XP runs slower, and they moved things around, which didn't make a lot of sense, and of course introduced a lot of bugs. XP was considered the same family as Windows 2000.

Strangely, in your dumb way, you didn't realize you made my point. All those things could have been added, without changing the interface, and making it so bloated and slower. Didn't you understand that?

Actually, they do change the kernel, although it's not completely new. That's why it gets bigger and slower. Don't you know anything?

My point is, the OS is huge and slow now, but it doesn't do anything the old one doesn't. They move stuff for no apparent reason, and manage to make things slower with each release. Why? Because idiots like you don't know any better, and buy it anyway.

I have to support all three, and of the three Windows 2000 is the fastest and easiest to use.

The problem is, they don't just tweak it to make it better. It's slower, buggier and takes up huge amount of resources now. Nobody buys a computer to run an OS, they buy it to run an application. Microsoft keeps creating bigger and slower operating systems, that don't show a marked improvement over the previous one (except for Windows 7, because Vista had so many problems).

An Atom with 1 GB can run Win 2K very fast, how about Windows 7? What does Windows 7 do that you can't do in Win 2K, assuming drivers? What applications has this platform availed to us, that we couldn't use before? None. It just runs everything slower.

In this case there is no point to even have win2000. Everything can be done on Linux. While new OSes keep adding features, the basics are all the same and all of this can be done on Linux which runs even faster. There is no point on building new OSes at all, or does it?

@TA152H

Dude, games run better on 7 than XP. I dual boot and ran bunches of benchmarks.

Sure it takes a little more RAM. Not enough to matter. And certainly not enough to override the stuff it does way better than XP. Networking stuff is a snap now, especially with wireless. (and generally windows 7 can find the wireless drivers you need)

Not only that, but if you're gonna be in the minimalist crowd, you need to move to linux. It's capabilities and features are certainly ahead of something like windows 2000. Even it's wireless stuff is approaching how easy to setup and use windows 7 is. (Typing this from ubuntu 10.04)

There is literally no point to something like windows 2000 anymore.

Win7 = Vista SE.

Well, that's kind of interesting since every site that benchmarked showed XP was faster than Vista, and Vista was slightly faster than Windows 7. But, XP is bloated too, I never warmed up to it.

Linux is a based on Unix, not NT, and is a different animal. I never liked Unix, and I don't like Linux. I'm not saying it's worthless or should be gotten rid of - some people like it. I've never liked Unix, and never will.

Windows 2000 is a minimalist OS? What doesn't it run? What's is missing? Aero? Wow, that's really important :-P . It's just faster, and uses less resources, but can run the same apps. I have servers up for a year at a time without rebooting - it's a very reliable operating system. I don't think it makes for a worse experience.

If you like Linux, fine. I don't like it, but I am glad people that do have it around. But, with respect to Windows, which was based more on VMS, it's gotten too big and slow.

Again, lets get back to why we have an OS. It's to run applications efficiently. Windows 7 is slower than Windows 2000, by a lot, uses way more memory, but does not allow any applications Win 2K doesn't.

Wireless is hard to set up in Windows 2000????? Oh my. Networking is easy too. I'm not sure what was so hard in Win2K that Windows 7 fixed.

Keep in mind, I'm not saying applications like wizards needed to remain the same, which apparently is what you're referring to. But, I have a real problem where an OS needs 2 GB to run well, and runs so dreadfully slow, without any real benefit.

I only used vista on very few occasions -- never on my own pc, btw...but everyone's right...we wouldn't have windows 7 without visa, so I don't know how he views it as a 'waste'. And while I'm a mac user and love it, Windows 7 seems like a great OS (I just haven't spent enough time with it yet).

hah, innovation. microsoft are not creative in any way. vista was them showing to the world their creative side, and they completely effed it up. so they went backward just to get things working again. all they do is "steal" ideas from everyone else, then get you to pay for it.

Vista should have been the Beta for Windows 7 not a full blown OS -_-