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• April 24, 2008 •
Last week I attended the Microsoft 2008 Global MVP conference. On the closing day I attended a keynote by Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer. He had a few interesting comments and things to share, one of which has been widely reported in the news by now, which was his comment that Windows Vista was 'a work in progress'. He got a good round of applause from the 1,700+ MVPs in the audience. Ballmer's words were:
"Windows Vista, a work in progress. (Applause.) Seriously, 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. And we just sort of kiss that stone and move on, because it turns out many things become problematic when you have those long release cycles. The design point, what you should be targeting, we can never let that happen again. We had some things that we can't just set the dial back that I think people wish we could.
Vista is bigger than XP, it's going to stay bigger than XP. We have to make sure it doesn't get bigger still, and that the performance, and the battery and the compatibility we're driving on the things that we need to drive hard to improve. And yet we did take some important big steps forward with Vista.
So I know I can get a lot of feedback from this crowd. The number one point of feedback always for MVPs is on Windows, I know I get a lot of feedback. I bet if I look I can get a little bit of feedback, I'm sure I can get a lot of constructive feedback, and believe me, top of mind for me, for Ray (Ozzie, Microsoft's Chief Software Architect) and the senior team here is making sure that we continue to drive forward, and take the good work that we did in Vista, take the chance for improvement and progress, and drive forward."
Unfortunately we didn't receive any more specific info on Microsoft's future plans; either for Vista or for the next version of Windows (currently being referred to as "Windows 7"), but it is clear that Microsoft will try to avoid the lengthy development process that marred Vista. We'll have to see how well they will do in the near future. Right now the consensus is that Microsoft wants to ship "Windows 7" by 2010.
On Windows XP's availability Ballmer had the following to say:
"In the meantime, we have some customers, a lot of customers using Vista, a lot of customers, and we have a lot of customers that are choosing to stay with Windows XP, and as long as those are both important options, we will be sensitive, and we will listen, and we will hear that. I got a piece of mail from a customer the other day that talked about not being able to get XP anymore, and we responded, XP is still available. And I know we're going to continue to get feedback from people on how long XP should be available. We've got some opinions on that. We've expressed our views, but certainly with this crowd, Steveb@Microsoft.com. I'm always interested in hearing from you on these and other issues."
While stopping short of offering any indication that Microsoft might (further) extend Windows XP's lifecycle, this comment - added to another comment he recently made at an event in Belgium where he told the audience: "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", does seem to indicate that Microsoft might be persuaded by its customers to extend Windows XP's life. OEM computer makers are still scheduled to have to stop selling models with Windows XP installed by the end of June this year.
Another interesting 'feedback' point occurred when Web search was discussed:
Steve Ballmer: "I need to get my annual feedback. How many of you use Live Search as your default? (A few dozen hands were raised.) How many of you use Yahoo Search as your default? (No hands were raised.) Let's try that one again. How many of you use Yahoo Search as your default? (One or two hands were raised.) Wow, we offered 31 bucks a share. How many of you use Google as your default? (Nearly everyone raised their hand.) I'm going to make you a deal. I'm going to make you a deal, I'm going to make you a deal. Here's the deal, we're going to do some stuff this year which I'm sure will be important to this crowd around blog search. After we do the stuff around blog search, I'm going to ask you for one thing, and I'm asking for it personally, just me, we'll send you a little reminder tickler mail, I'm sure I can get Toby (Toby Richards, Microsoft GM, Community Support Services) to do that, but I'm going to pick a week later this year after we get our new blog stuff in place, which I think is probably pretty important for this crowd, and I'm going to ask you, it's all voluntary, but I'm going to ask you one week switch your default, one week. At the end of the week, I want you to send me mail, I'm going to make it SteveBfoo instead of my normal SteveB account, but I'll want feedback, how was your week, what happened, what did you like, what didn't you like with all of the tenacity, and intensity, and passion, and insights that this group can bring."
You can read a transcript of the entire keynote on the Microsoft Web site.
