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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer reflects on Windows Vista
Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system has been on the market for consumers for a little over a year now. During that time, the operating system has seen its fair share of both praise and criticism.
As is customary with Windows operating systems that have been on the market for roughly a year, Microsoft recently released the first Service Pack for Vista. Service Pack 1 (SP1) addressed a number of shortcomings with the operating system and rolled in a number of hotfixes and patches that have been released via Windows Update over the past year.
Now that Vista has had some time to establish itself in the marketplace and receive a fresh boost of energy with SP1, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is now reflecting on the operating system.
“Windows Vista: A work in progress,” said Ballmer to a crowd of Microsoft MVPs in Seattle. “A very important piece of work, and I think we did a lot of things right, and I think we have a lot of things we need to learn from. Certainly, you never want to let five years go between releases. Can we just sort of kiss that stone and move on?”
Ballmer went on to add, “It turns out many things become problematic when you have those long release cycles. The design point, what you should be targeting. We can’t ever let that happen again.”
Ballmer also noted that there are plenty of happy customers of the Windows Vista operating system as well as Windows XP. He remarked that he has received emails from staunch supporters of the Windows XP operating system, but declined to give any indications that Microsoft would go any further than its intention to provide Windows XP Home to ultra-low-cost PCs (ULPCs) until June 2010.
Does Ballmer Need To Go?
Posted on: May 5, 2008
Microsoft’s dramatic decision this weekend to withdraw its offer for Yahoo and not pursue a hostile bid raises a whole host of questions. What happens to Yahoo now? What happens to Microsoft? Or is this just a tactic to drive down the price of Yahoo’s shares so that Microsoft can go hostile with a lower offer? And if the deal really is dead, does Steve Ballmer
need to start looking for a new job?
This last question may not be so hypothetical. Ballmer has been the big driver behind this deal at Microsoft—some would say to the point of obsession. After the disaster that has been Windows Vista (Microsoft’s core product), Ballmer may have realized he needed to redeem himself in the eyes of Microsoft’s board. And the “transformative” deal with Yahoo was the way he was going to do it.
One reading of Ballmer’s obsession with the deal is that he felt his job was on the line if he didn’t get it done. According to one secondhand account that leaked to us yesterday before the deal was called off, over the past week Ballmer increasingly has been “yelling and screaming at employees for almost no reason” and is being “more of a tyrant than usual.” One executive on the Microsoft deal team supposedly made a comment about “not having to worry about Ballmer anymore” if the Yahoo deal fell through. What the exec didn’t know, though, was that Ballmer was in earshot, and he screamed back that the deal would go through and that he wouldn’t let the board “crucify” him.
As things stand, the fact that Ballmer was not able to close the deal could put his job in jeopardy. The big questions are: If he really does walk away, can he put this distraction behind the company? Or is it too late for Ballmer? If Microsoft’s board loses patience with him, it might have to ask Blll Gates to temporarily come back as CEO until it finds a replacement. After all, Ballmer has already made a strong and convincing case for why Microsoft needs Yahoo to make its online and advertising strategy work (it needs the scale of Yahoo’s display and search advertising inventory to compete with Google). It is not clear how it can achieve its objectives on its own or through other acquisitions.
Maybe Ballmer backed down because he realized the deal was becoming too big of a distraction and he didn’t want to drag it out further given Yahoo’s continued resistance. (And save his job in the process). Or perhaps he thinks he can still get it done by making Yahoo’s stock price collapse and come back with a hostile offer. (After all, if you are going to go hostile, you’d want to drive down the stock price of the target company to make your offer look even more attractive to shareholders). We’ll find out later this week.
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Steve Ballmer doesn’t think customers are exactly screaming to keep Windows XP.
The final days for Microsoft XP are fast approaching, according to Microsoft
A hot debate is raging over what Microsoft should do with Windows XP. Windows Vista is simply not viable for low-end PCs that are a mainstay of the consumer home computing market. Windows XP was originally scheduled to be discontinued in January 2008. In preparation for this phase out, most retail computers were to be loaded with Vista.
However, the lawsuits and negative feedback that ensued from underperforming computers struggling with Vista, led Microsoft to reconsider and offer XP “downgrades”. It also gave XP a stay of execution until June 2008, sixth months after the planned date.
June 2008 is fast approaching and now Microsoft is faced with the dilemma of whether to officially retire the OS or further extend its career. In Belgium on Thursday, Steve Ballmer spoke to reporters about the OS’s fate. He indicated that while customer demand could extend the life of the OS, currently he did not see customers demanding it, and he felt that unless something changes, XP would be headed the way of the dinosaur.
He stated, “XP will hit an end-of-life. We have announced one. If customer feedback varies we can always wake up smarter but right now we have a plan for end-of-life for new XP shipments.”
All retail sales and licensing, under the current plan, will end June 30. Ballmer said that despite difficulties, most retail computers today are being sold with Vista, and most customers prefer Vista.
However, some customers portray a different story. They say that they were unable to buy XP in stores. Further, they say that in order to get XP they had to buy their computers as small businesses. It is indeed true that XP is virtually nonexistent at large retailers such as Best Buy and Circuit City.
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