Ballmer: We Wasted Too Many Years on Vista

[eyemaster]

You guys need to stop focussing on just the OS. There's a whole infrastructure that surrounds the OS. Building an OS for the home user is simple, but building it for a business of thousands of PC's and a way to deploy and manage it, on top of testing and integration plus as a development platform? Windows 7 is light years ahead of what it was with Windows XP. We have not tested Vista at work, but Windows 7 is a result of the groing pains of Vista, so thanks!

 

[Deleted member 978]

What's this??? ... Windows fanboys telling folks they have to upgrade their hardware to run Windows 7 ... wait a minute, isn't that the same "complaint" you Windows fanboys go on about for Apple's OSX??

Odd, I'm running the latest OSX Snow Leopard on my "old" 2007 MacPro and my Mac is actually faster and more responsive than it was in 2007 ... oh yeah, and I haven't ever needed to defragment my hard drives. And when running applications like Cinema 4D, Motion, Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Age of Empires III, Call of Duty, Photoshop, etc. etc. -- they actually run faster than on my other PC that I constantly keep upgrading to "keep up" with the Windows OS hardware requirements.

You folks are a crackin' me up. Do any of you actually know anything about Windows 7 and Vista? 64bit OS doesn't help when you run 32bit games and applications ... gaaah ... Tom's should instigate a basic computing comprehension test before allowing anyone to post.

 

[orellius]

[citation][nom]V8VENOM[/nom]What's this??? ... Windows fanboys telling folks they have to upgrade their hardware to run Windows 7 ... wait a minute, isn't that the same "complaint" you Windows fanboys go on about for Apple's OSX??Odd, I'm running the latest OSX Snow Leopard on my "old" 2007 MacPro and my Mac is actually faster and more responsive than it was in 2007 ... oh yeah, and I haven't ever needed to defragment my hard drives. And when running applications like Cinema 4D, Motion, Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Age of Empires III, Call of Duty, Photoshop, etc. etc. -- they actually run faster than on my other PC that I constantly keep upgrading to "keep up" with the Windows OS hardware requirements.You folks are a crackin' me up. Do any of you actually know anything about Windows 7 and Vista? 64bit OS doesn't help when you run 32bit games and applications ... gaaah ... Tom's should instigate a basic computing comprehension test before allowing anyone to post.[/citation]

He was complaining about Windows hogging all his ram, so buy more ram? For which a 64-bit OS is required...gah?

 

[TheKurrgan]

TA152H: I agree in principle with what you're saying. However, one of the things I had to accept was the fact that the computer industry is fueled by the userbase, not the system administrators or the power users of the world. As such, they want a computer that does whatever it is they want to do, looks pretty and all that jazz. As such, we have Windows 7. I love computer gaming, as such I usually own fairly new hardware. Windows 7 on todays hardware is quite adequate in terms of speed, and I dont honestly think comparing Windows 2000 to it is fair to windows 2000. Windows 2000 was and still is a fairly solid OS, however it is incapable of certain new technologies, and in my experience it doesnt hold up the same level of intense networking load as Server 2003 does. Hardware compatibility is also an issue, and frankly the industry has moved on. Server 2008R2 (Windows 7 "Server") seems to be a fairly decent server platform, while I do think they included too much fluff for a server, which generally has ONE purposes, and is manned by intelligent life.
Microsoft has at this point lost the balance between high end use and having home users be happy.
As to linux, from a sever perspective it is quite nice. The array of file systems available for it make it an excellent choice for alot of database applications or file servers, and it is completely configurable to the desired application. I have a MySQL DB running with over 600GB of data in it, and find its performance for a single server to be superior to Windows on the same hardware (A few percent mind you, but on a project with no budget and all that, every little bit counts)
Also the server boots up, and loads only ONE thing: The DB Server. So all 12GB of RAM is available for use by the DB. (less around 20 for the OS its self)
That said, its all a matter of opinion as to what is better in the home sector. I personally feel the UNIX lay out of a system to be far superior to that of the Windows layout, especially the lack of a registry when dealing with current linux distros or BSD. This is one of the areas Apple shares in, and if they werent so arrogant could have slapped Microsoft hard years ago when Vista came out. But alas, looks like another decade of guaranteed Windows dominance.....

 

[Guest]

@ TA152H

When new OS comes out with new features that 'pushes an envelope' or 'allows for increased productivity' it can be used as a marketing tool for not only the OS provider, but hardware manufacturers as well (Windows 7 ready!) Many people make money off of a new OS release just because it markets well.

You say the new OS's are bloated. Well, this also forces hardware innovation to keep up. If everyone was fine with running Windows 2000, we'd probably be nowhere near where we are now.

I see you don't like Linux, but what you speak of is a Linux model (kernel updates regularly)...and the people behind distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora are productive because of their open-source motto, but have you seen any hardware innovations driven by the Linux model? That stuff is designed to run on any old PoS that you fish out of a garage sale.

With all that said, I use both Linux and Windows and I can tell you that both business models (if you can call it that) have their place. They feed off of each other per se. If you don't like the Windows model, go out and find something else..or learn to like Linux. I bet if you give it a shot, you will like it.

 

[Guest]

V8Venom ... you could take any decent spec computer from 2007 and install 7 on it and it'll run faster than it did with Vista... oh, and yeah x32 programs can only use up to 4gb of RAM... but the OS can still reside on and use that other 4GB you have free.

and to TA152H... I wouldn't use a computer with the RAM specs you gave to start a fire. It's that useless. Try upgrading and then tell me how useless it is when you're running 8GB of ram on a quad core processor.

 

[wayneepalmer]

I realize that I'm going to get blasted for this but, when I built my current rig it had XP on it.

When I put Win 7 on it, everything worked about 3 to 5 times faster than it did in XP. My boot time dropped from about 2 minutes to 45 seconds to Internet access (without using the mini OS on the ASUS board)..

Core i7 920 With Arctic Zero H/S
ASUS P6X58D
6 Gb G-skill PC1600 Ram
MSI 250 GTS 512 (wife won't let me get new GPU's)
W/D Cav Black 640 GB Hdd.

 

[Guest]

I ran Vista 64 with no problems at all. It's kind of funny but I never had one single issue with it. My brother running XP had more issues running games and the like than I did. Go figure.

Running Win 7 64 bit now and so far with a slight improvement in memory usage, I can't really tell the difference. I'm not too keen on how they do the task bar with 7. I think the Vista approach was much better, particularly when you have a dozen or more windows open.

 

[applegetsmelaid]

Say that to a room filled with the people who worked the thousands of "lost" man hours on Vista instead of a room of CEOs. Ballmer is such a coward and will say whatever stakeholders tell him to say.

 

[JohnnyLucky]

I don't thin I would want company applications and data stored, accessed, and run from on a third party network.

 

[ravewulf]

Well DUH! Considering they scrapped it part way through and started over at one point, yeah, that was a lot of time wasted. (this message brought to you by a user who loves Vista)

 

[u_hsen]

is it just me or windows 7 is exactly like windows vista?

i really can't tell the differences.

i actually like windows vista over windows xp because im a gamer and vista supports directx10 where as windows xp only supports directx9

 

[Guest]

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).

I know this was a typo and I don't like it when someone misses the point of someone's argument because of some inane little feature like a typo, but ...

I have to wonder if this "we wouldn't have windows 7 without VISA" was a Freudian slip ...