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translation-

we tried to follow Apple in a complete OS overhaul and implement new innovations like they did but we could not copy everything they did in a reasonable time frame.

You (MDN et al) really like to slam MS on Vista - and rightly so - but be(a)ware: Eventually MS will ship Vista and they are doing the right thing by continuing to delay it so that when it is finally released, it does not experience the pain that XP and other versions have.

Apple has had a huge oportunity here the last three years and unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, Apple has not been able to materially dent the Windows armor. It will be even more difficuly in 2007/8 when Vista is released.

Well, to be fair, Apple adapted an existing operating system, rather than starting from scratch. They also leveraged powerful tools and environments introduced with the acquisition of NeXT. At the end of the day, Steve Jobs has been involved with the evolution of the Mac platform from the day it was born in one way or another.

Nice one gforce. nice to the max.

We made an upfront decision that was, I'll say, incredibly strategic and brilliant and wise -- and was not implementable,'

How could any decision that is not implemetable be considered anything but worthless?

oh yeah, this is microsoft

"We'll never again do a Windows update this big,"

Hemmmm, wasn't Vista a completely new OS? A ground-breaking entirely new OS?

Nahhhh, just an XP update. Just a tad bigger than SP2 but enough to have Microsoft to their knees. Next, trim down to an update that they can manage and they'll meet shipment date of XP SP2, aka Vista.

@me

I believe it wasn't Apple's goal to make a dent in the Windows platform for the past three years. That's only been their goal for the past 6 months, and the dent is very noticeable. The previous 2 1/2 years were spent preparing for that.

How "incredibly strategic and brilliant and wise" can a descision be when it is unimplementable?

Maybe Balmer and company need to consult their paperclips about the definitions of those terms.

I cant wait for next weeks headline; Balmer Hangs himself


nah he wouldnt do that, he's got too much money, I could see him going even MOAR crazy than he already is tho.

"We made an upfront decision that was, I'll say, incredibly strategic and brilliant and wise -- and was not implementable."

BBWWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!

I just took an incredibly satisfing and brilliant dump----and it was not flushable.

Ballmer: 'We tried to incubate too many new innovations and integrate them simultaneously

He actually meant: 'We tried to COPY too many new innovations and integrate them simultaneously

And who made that mistake, the Chief-Software architect?

You guys are really missing the subtlety in Balmer's comment. He is poking fun at MS with this comment.

me, you said: You (MDN et al) really like to slam MS on Vista - and rightly so - but be(a)ware: Eventually MS will ship Vista and they are doing the right thing by continuing to delay it so that when it is finally released, it does not experience the pain that XP and other versions have.

This is wishful thinking on your part that MS has learned ANY lessons and/or changed its corporate culture.

Apple has had a huge oportunity here the last three years and unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, Apple has not been able to materially dent the Windows armor. It will be even more difficuly in 2007/8 when Vista is released.

Apple *has* made dents, big ones. Erosion of the Windows base - a huge base - is happening slowly and steadily.

OK, i've got this idea of being able to fly, be invisable, and a bunch of other "incubating" ideas that are bad ass. but I was not able to get the kinks worked out, but it was still, Bad Ass!

Byaaaahh

Coolfactor: Make note that neither OS X nor Vista are brand new OS's. OS X did use BSD Unix and the NEXT OS, and Vista really is the same old Windows with a new dress on.

i've been using a recent build of vista. it's nice and is clearly superior to XP and is not XP SP 3.

apple is great at building what they can accomplish and getting those innovations into OSX on time.

microsoft bit off more than they can choose. ballmer isn't exactly wrong on this.

i know many microsofties. they are smart, talented young people.

the next version of office is superb.

and i love my mac, i just don't look at MS as a bunch of losers. they aren't.

they have grade B products with grade A business execution.

but their products are getting better. i think that they will get stronger in the future, not weaker.

apple could end up owning the consumer market much more so than it does now whereas MS can own the business market. it makes sense to me.

When you think of the massive money and people resources that Microsoft has to work with, it's incredible that the tale of Longhorn-Vista has evolved/devolved into such an incredible mess.

Also, taking into account the developers and companies Microsoft has crushed in order to gain their current position, it's even more incredible.

WHY don't they just FIRE Balmer? CLEARLY, he's unable to do his job effectively.

Bottom line?
It's karma. The evil Microsoft has done is coming back to bite them.

To be fair, there's not much to compare between Vista and OS X. The article shows Ballmer's idiocy when he says Vista's goals was "... an upfront decision that was, I'll say, incredibly strategic and brilliant and wise -- and was not implementable."

"incredibly strategic and wise?" Except it didn't work. So how great could it be? And since it's not here and years late, and relegated to XP SP 3 status, it's still a turd. It's an incredibly strategic and brilliant and wise... turd. But still a turd.

OS X as we know it was about five or six years in development but Apple did it one piece at a time and made it work. Remember, Apple bought NeXT in late 1996, Jobs took over in mid-1997 and OS X wasn't worth a crap until Jaguar in 2002. That's a lotta development time to get to where OS X is today. And Apple didn't exactly start from scratch since NeXT already had a highly touted OS.

What Apple did with development of OS X was a brilliant strategy. And wise. And implementable. Add to that the Carbon layer to run OS 9 applications alongside OS X, the Cocoa and Xcode layers for rapid application development and cross platform (PPC and Intel) development and you can see that Apple was preparing for the future while shoring up the company's financials AND launching a whole new product category in the iPod and iTMS.

In other words, over the past nearly 10 years, Apple executed well, and continues to improve. In the meantime, Microsoft's execution has only become worse.

Better yet, MSFT has to buy back their own stock to the tune of billions of dollars just to keep it from falling through the floor. The empire is falling, folks.

Tera Patricks
Mac360

microsoft bit off more than they can *chew*

typo...

macosrumors.com is DOWN forced or not im not sure.

Aren't most corporations still on Win2K?? Maybe the laptops have XP but every large company I've visted is still using Win2K on their desktops.... hell they don't even want you to have a CD drive...

I don't understand how he can talk about Vista's delays as thought they were in the past. Like, "Yeah, that was rough getting that thing to market, but now that's it's been released, we can analyze what went wrong and what we did right along the way." As far as I can tell, the beast is still caged.

Boy this is sure telling...

"Wall Street has kept Microsoft's share price stagnant through most of Ballmer's six-year reign as the company's CEO"

I wonder just what Ballmer has on Gates?

In any other company Ballmer whould have been long gone!

And to say that he F--ked Up on their major #1 product is adding fuel to the fire!

If I was a major stockholder I would be pissed and really vocal about either he goes today or my money goes - bottom line!

A little off topic but I'm curious as to what people think.

Imagine if MS had a complete shake-up of management. And started on a completely new OS, like Apple did with OS X.

Which woud be better?

Discuss

With what Apple will release in the second half of 2006 and in 2007, the dent will be much bigger in Mafia$oft's armor come the end of 2007.

Worst thing is that this i standard operating procedure with M$

@ me

Thanks for the good laugh. I almost fell out of my chair and hurt myself though.

Wise - marked by the exercise of good judgment or common sense in practical matters; "judicious use of one's money"; "a sensible manager"; "a wise decision"

Uh, no Steve B. Not even close.

Again, the Microsoft faithful come crawling out of the woodwork to hector us into accepting the one sure truth -- Windows will return and it will own us all! This has quickly become a self-parody, guys, and we're all laughing at your misplaced faith.

Too many "innovations"

Ha Ha Ha

Boy that wasn't the "big mistake", the mistake was not stealing fast enough to keep up with the mac os in the first place. They were already 5-10 years behind, so did they have a choice? Hell, they were 5 years behind BeOS for that matter! They had to do something major to attempt to move into the 21st century.

I blame the root of their problem on their slow photo copy machines. They should kill the towels again and invest their $$ where it'll do their OS some good and get them some modern, speedy digital copying equipment.

Ballmer?

Analyze?

The name and the word do not belong in the same sentence. Tsk tsk.

All I can think of is "bull crap"! Ballmer is full of bull.

With all of the world's resources and 9000 of the planet's best programmers, to make such a monumental "mistake" in planning, this isn't an "oops". There is something much bigger they are not revealing.

I can't believe that ANYONE is swallowing this crap. If true, then Microsoft's entire management structure is completely incapable of any type of long term planning. Their stocks should fall to 50 cents.

After all of this time, all of the delays, all of the cuts in functionality, YEARS after announcing it will not be all new but just regurgitated flawed XP code, THIS IS THE BEST they can do? The big, huge, best-on-the-planet, software company has no clue how to write modern and innovative software?!

This should be big headline news!!

What sort of brainwashing has Microsoft done to make everyone think it was a minor glitch in their planning? They have NO PLANS for anything innovative for the foreseeable future. Perhaps 25 cents per share for their stock.

The world's ONLY REMAINING HOPE for computing innovation is Apple. Microsoft has just admitted defeat in their ability to do ANYTHING of significant value.

1. Not so fast everybody. I like where Balmer is taking MS - deeper into the sewer, where it belongs. Lets give him all the time he needs, say, until MS has 30% market share.

Maybe Jobs is paying Balmer's salary or something (would it be any different if he was?)

2. Doubtlessly there are some smart folks at m$ who either don't care or are unaware that they are working for an disreputable convicted felon, chronic liar (check any press release) with absolutely no integrity.

But, if so, how is it that m$ is incapable of innovating? Is it that anybody who innovates is fired? Why do these allegedly smart people stick around?

3. Balmer will probably get to ship XP SP3/vista. Will it be a train wreck? - it won't be very good - m$ doesn't have a very good reputation for shipping quality, and the pressure here has got to be massive, so this will be worse than normal, and the scrutiny will be massive.

Sadly, this will probably be the end of the line for him - he'll be turfed, much as I wish he would stay to "finish" the job of right sizing m$'s market share

4. Really, what we're witnessing is the rip-off of Apple v2.0 - v1.0 was Mac Classic in windows 95, this is OS X.

Apple has to really lay it on thick with Leopard, since, in a lot of people's eyes, the m$ felon will have "caught" up with apple, that is, ripped off all their new stuff.

I think post vista will be interesting. Will apple keep adding stuff to be clearly ahead? That is their plan, and I think they'll try hard. Will it be broadly perceived as ahead? Hope so, hard to predict. Leopard has to be killer.

Regarding the differences between Gates and Ballmer, anyone else notice "that one talks to you like you are in 4th grade and the other talks to you like HE is in 4th grade?"

(Borrowed from Saturday Night Live)

Peace.

"Eventually MS will ship Vista and they are doing the right thing by continuing to delay it so that when it is finally released, it does not experience the pain that XP and other versions have."

It's a good possibilty that Vista is being delayed to give the PC vendors time to make a box powerfull enough for Vista yet cheap enough for consumers. That or MS just doesn't know what in the name of god they are doing.

Good for DELL.


As for pain, based on what has been said about Vista and that MS's intro into anti-spyware and anti-virus for a yearly subscription fee, I'd say there is much pain.

A new learning curve with Vista and the company that sells this broken wheel of a product wants to sell you a patch fix that you have to pay every year.

Good for MS.
Good for IT people since this means a new certification.
Good for consumers only because they'll save money on anti-spyware and anti-virus.
Bad for Norton and others.

Well, actually, this reminds me of a similar piece of history - Copland - OS 8. It was supposed to be the end all, brand new from the ground up, multitask, multithread, multievery thing and no crashes, etc. Apple couldn't do it. It ain't easy and expecially when you are bound by running old legacy stuff. MS should learn that they don't have to copy Apple in EVERY way!

you know, I used to hate these intellitext ads, but now I'm starting to like them, especially in this article.

scroll over...

"operating system" and you are kindly pointed to LinuxWorld, certainly safer option than any flavor of M$ OS.

"visions" offers help to improve your flawed vision, maybe it works for strategic vision too.

"share price" points to safe stocks, god help anyone that's still holding msft.

and my favorite from another article (but not this one), scrolling over 'windows vista' simply said "loading" then the intellitext link disappeared.

@ me,

'for a variety of reasons, Apple has not been able to materially dent the Windows armor'

Last time I looked somwhere north of 114,000 third world hackers have already dented the Windows armour.

As they say in Moscow, 'Windows has no stinkin' armour'

Dave Mac is correct. The rank and file users in most corporations will be lucky to get XP loaded boxes this year. Corporations don't rush out and buy the latest versions of MS's offerings. Once they have a relatively stable set-up on the their boxes, they stick with it. So, who will buy Vista, if not the big boys and girls. The WINFanatics, because they just love to tinker, and unenlightened consumers, because they'll have no choice.

Microsoft, despite all the bad publicity on the delays, has plenty of time to release a good, working version of Vista. They have as much time as the corporations will give them, I'd say at least 5 years from the official release.

Windows Vista in romon number is Windows V. It's an easy math. V=X/2 simple.

@me:

"Apple has had a huge oportunity here the last three years and unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, Apple has not been able to materially dent the Windows armor. It will be even more difficuly in 2007/8 when Vista is released"

No, it's not for a variety of reasons. It's for one reason...Vista is delayed. Steve Jobs is probably as frustrated as anyone with the slippage. Why? Because as soon as Vista is released and most folks discover that their 3 year old Dell, bottom of the barrel, Windows box won't run it they'll be looking at new computers. Now think...how does a $1300 Dell laptop compare to a similarly spec'ed $1100 MacBook? If prices are within 20%, and one operating system is bullet proof, while the other is Swiss cheese, if one is elegant and cool, while the other is butt ugly, and if one comes with killer consumer apps bundled, while the other doesn't, which machine/OS combination is going to sell?

"We made an upfront decision that was, I'll say, incredibly strategic and brilliant and wise -- and was not implementable."

What an absolutely rediculous statement. Balmer must think we are all idiots. Perhaps the strategy WAS implementable, but not by Microsoft under Steve Balmer's leadership.

Anyone who thinks Vista is being delayed to ensure a superior problem-free product is delusional. It it being delayed because there is no choice. If and when it does ship, it will be barely ready and have even more issues than Windows XP after initial release. Who thinks otherwise?

Microsoft is following Apple's historical lead, even when it comes to mistakes.

Apple had Copeland. It was deemed "not implementable" after spending a good chuck of the 1990's R&D;budget. Portions of development results were salvaged and incorporated into Mac OS 9, which really should have been called Mac OS 8.7 because there was nothing really revolutionary.

[copy paste the paragraph above and replace a few words]

Microsoft had Longhorn. It was deemed "not implementable" after spending a good chuck of the (20)00's R&D;budget. Portions of development results were salvaged and incorporated into Windows Vista, which really should have been called Windows XP SP 3 because there was nothing really revolutionary.

Based on history, Microsoft's next step would be to dump Windows (or go with an interim two-OS strategy) and start its future OS from a clean slate without the legacy burden.

Apple has successful transitions make MS's Vista seem like an OS security update.

Hardware:
1. 6080x0 --> PPC
2. PPC --> x86

OS and Software:
1. Classic OS --> OS X

Don't tell me that Apple has anything to fear from VISTA.

VISTA doesn't even catch up with Tiger.

And when it ships Apple will have moved on to Leopard.

Microsoft are watching the tail-lights of Apple dissapear over the horizon.

daveo-

I award you the "smartest and most honest post of the board" award, for your above post that is very thoughtful and intelligent.

As any experienced developer understands> The best ideas, the best people and the best projects all run the risk of getting bogged down by unanticipated complexity.

I've worked with Microserfs before and been impressed by their capabilities as developers. No matter how brilliant they are, it's actually pretty easy for me to understand how tough it would be to do something like Vista and just get lost in the mess.

What I would like to know is how Apple has managed to deliver such an endless stream of "relatively" high quality software / product innovation? What is their special sauce.

An asshole CEO with a knack for winning (Jobs) does not make Apple capable of it's remarkable success all by himself. A great vision is much less than half the battle.

Does anyone have any insite as to how Apple internal manages people and projects to consistently produce such well integrated, high quality solutions?

Thanks for your feedback

We made an upfront decision that was, I'll say, incredibly strategic and brilliant and wise -- and was not implementable

Oh please. Green-lighting an impossible Holy Grail project is always incredibly STUPID! There are no medals for failing halfway up Everest.

If Ballmer had any credibility or balls, he'd take full responsibility for Vista's failure and step down immediately. Looks like he still has a job as of this posting.

Anyway, Ballmer, you're still in charge, so spare us the reasoning and excuses.
What are you going to do about the mess you helped make?

Steve Jobs announces "one more thing".

Steve Ballmer announces "one big wrong decision".

Enough said.