Ballmer: Most Vista work came in last two years
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(InfoWorld) - While it's taken Microsoft Corp. half a decade to bring out a new version of its client operating system, the real development work on Windows Vista only took around two years, according to the head of the company. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive officer, reflected on what Microsoft had learned from the process and delays inÂ bringing Vista to marketÂ during a question-and-answer session followingÂ the business launch of the OSÂ Thursday in New York. "Time is sort of a funny thing," Ballmer said. "You need to give new technologies time to incubate before you try to bring them together," he added. "Let each [technology] come to market individually and then do the integration." Microsoft spent the first two years of its Vista development process building a variety of new technologies and then struggled to integrate them, according to Ballmer. The third year went smoothly as Microsoft's developers focused their efforts on the Windows XP Service Pack 2, with some of that technology ultimately winding up in Vista, not XP. The bulk of what has now been released as Vista Microsoft developed in the last two to two and half years, Ballmer said. With his habitual flair for superlatives, Ballmer described Vista as."the highest quality, most secure Windows operating system ever." However, he was quick to add that Microsoft won't rest on its laurels. In its next Windows client OS release, the vendor will look to do more to support the major changes already under way in computer hardware, notably the shift from single-core to multicore processors and improvements in network infrastructure, he said. Microsoft also wants to offer more functionality in its OS for IT administrators so that the software is simpler to manage and for software developers in relation to storage management and other features that didn't make it into Vista, according to Ballmer. A future operating system also needs to take into account the move from software to software-as-a-service or as Ballmer said, "software plus service." Users can expect to see "a lot more service enablement" in the Windows OS, he said. Ballmer estimated that by the time Microsoft launches the consumer versions of Vista and Office 2007 scheduled for Jan. 30, 2007 worldwide, the company will have spent "hundreds of millions of dollars" on marketing the new software. Â
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After two years of fits and starts, Microsoft will finally deliver its Virtual Server 2005 product, which company officials contend will be an important contributor to its Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI), the company's plan for managing distributed systems.
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Nearly half of businesses are in some phase of preparing to update desktops to Windows Vista with small businesses moving the fastest to implement the OS, according to a new report released Monday.The number of organizations evaluating and testing Vista increased from 29 percent in February 2007 to 48 percent by early November 2007, found the report, commissioned by reseller CDW and based on information collected by Walker Information from 772 IT decision makers. Moreover, about 35 percent of companies are currently implementing or have implemented Vista already, compared to 12 percent last February, the report said.The report is the third of a wave of reports on Vista adoption that CDW has done since the OS was in its final testing phases in October 2006. In the latest phase of release, which tracked Vista adoption from October 31 until Nov. 7, 2007, small businesses comprised 53 percent of those companies either using or evaluating Vista. The higher-education segment came in second, with 49 percent reporting that they are evaluating or using the OS, while medium-to-large businesses were third, with 48 percent.Because of lingering hardware and application compatibility issues between existing company IT assets and Vista, CDW still advises customers to move to Vista on a case-by-case basis, said David Cottingham, director of product and partner management at CDW. In the case of small businesses, they may not have the application or hardware dependencies on Windows XP that larger businesses have.&quot;There are still definitely concerns when you get into custom applications in industries that will run on XP,&quot; he said. &quot;If [companies] have custom applications that don&#39;t run on Vista yet, they&#39;re going to stay on XP.&quot;CDW is still selling both XP and Vista, but Cottingham said the company does not have data on which version of the OS is selling more now that Vista has been available to businesses for more than a year. In September, Microsoft had to extend the OEM&#160;license for XP for five more months through June 30, 2008, because of customer demand for the OS. Microsoft had planned to stop selling XP through OEMs and retailers on Jan. 31.For its part, Microsoft has made strides to resolve compatibility issues with updates to Vista, and the numbers from CDW&#39;s survey seem to reflect that. In February, 50 percent of companies said they were buying additional hardware and software assets to migrate to Vista; by November, that number was down to 44 percent.Many believe it&#39;s inevitable that any businesses currently running XP will eventually move to Vista; it&#39;s just a matter of when. The release of Vista SP! (Service Pack 1), which is scheduled to be generally available by the end of March, should serve to increase the numbers of companies adopting Vista. Microsoft issued on Friday a public refresh of the first release candidate for SP1, which suggests the software update will be in its final release according to schedule.However, there is some belief among industry watchers that if Microsoft releases the next version of Windows, code-named Windows Vista 7, by its target of late next year to early 2010, some businesses may opt to skip Vista and move directly from XP to Windows 7 instead.
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Microsoft's latest and supposedly greatest operating system, Vista, appears to be falling fall short of sales goals, but CEO Steve Ballmer says it's all in how you interpret the info. In Game|Life.
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Microsoft COO Kevin Turner this week echoed comments earlier this year from CEO Steve Ballmer that Windows Vista won't be the last major OS update to come from the company.
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Microsoft Corp.  founder Bill  Gates said on Tuesday the company's Windows Vista operating  system has received an incredible reception.
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(InfoWorld) - Thursday was finally windows Vista launch day. But though banners were flying in downtown Manhattan on the big day, celebrating the launch of Vista, Office 2007 and Exchange 2007, CEO Steve Ballmer made it clear that the company is anxious to move on, while business customers pegged for Vista adoption wondered whether there was really much to celebrate. âThereâs a bunch of work we still need to do,â Ballmer said of the next Windows client OS. Supporting the shift from single-core to multicore chips and improvements in network infrastructure are priorities. Microsoft also wants to add more features to meet the needs of IT administrators, software developers and end-users. âHow we do software plus service within Windows is going to continue to be a big theme,â Ballmer said. Enterprise customers were wary. âSure itâs a big day for Microsoft, but what are we really getting?â asks Paul Lindo, an independent New York IT consultant. âWith all the delays and features being dropped, this looks to me like it might just be Windows XP with a prettier face.â Vista suffered several features âadjustmentsâ as well as a lengthier-than-expected road to shrink, including the infamous 2004 dumping of WinFS and a ground-up re-programming effort. But now that the day is finally here, Microsoft is well pleased with its new OS offering. âIt may have been a long road, but watching how our early adopters are responding to the platform, we know weâve got a winner,â said Brad Goldberg, Microsoftâs general manager of client product management. Responding to views such as Lindoâs, Goldberg said he remained assured. âVista was designed specifically to give business users recognizable benefits over the last generation platform,â he said. âThat includes productivity, security, networking and noticeably less reliance on IT.â Those last two items especially represent significant development efforts, covering the new UAC authentication model, updated internal diagnostics (including error messages that actually speak English), a completely revamped networking client and new IT tools such as the Reliability Monitor -- a quick dashboard of system reliability. These features were built specifically so users would spend less time talking to the help desk, thus decreasing overall IT spending. Windows is far better prepared for initial deployment than its predecessors, Goldberg said, citing more than a year of overall QA effort, by far the longest QA period in Microsoftâs history. Despite the enterprise focus of some features, it will still be consumers who lead the charge on Vista adoption. According to a report released by IDC last week, Vista will account for 90 percent of new Windows client deployments in 2007 by home users, compared with just 35 percent of new Windows client deployments by businesses.
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After more than five years of  development, over 50 million lines of software code, a $6  billion investment and a few headaches, Microsoft Corp.'s   Windows Vista finally reaches consumers this week.
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(InfoWorld) - With Vista just out the door, MicrosoftÂ is now drawing up plans to deliver its follow-up client operating system by the end of 2009, according to the executive in charge of building the product's core components. That would be a much faster turn-around than Vista, which shipped more than five years after Windows XP, but Vista was exceptional, said Ben Fathi, corporate vice president of development with Microsoft's Windows Core Operating System Division this week at theÂ RSA ConferenceÂ in San Francisco. Microsoft originally planned for its XP follow-up to include a number of radical changes to Windows, including a new file system and a reinvented user interface, but after the company's products were hit by widespread worm outbreaks in 2003, Microsoft redirected almost its entire engineering effort to locking down Windows with the XP Service Pack 2 release. "We put Longhorn on the back burner for awhile," Fathi said. "Then when we came back to it, we realized that there were incremental things that we wanted to do, and significant improvements that we wanted to make in Vista that we couldn't deliver in one release." Vista shipped about two-and-a-half years after XP SP 2, and Vista's follow-up is expected to take about the same amount of time, according to Fathi. "You can think roughly two, two-and-a-half years is a reasonable time frame that our partners can depend on and can work with," he said. "That's a good timeframe for refresh." That time line would put Microsoft's next client operating system out by the end of 2009. Last year, Microsoft said that the code name for this Vista follow-up is Vienna, but Fathi said he could not disclose the current name. "We've been told not to use it publicly," he said. So what will be the coolest new feature in Vienna? According to Fathi, that's still being worked out. "We're going to look at a fundamental piece of enabling technology. Maybe its hypervisors, I don't know what it is," he said. "Maybe it's a new user interface paradigm for consumers." "It's too early for me to talk about it," he added. "But over the next few months I think you're going to start hearing more and more."
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Formally taking the wraps off its latest flagship operating system, Microsoft is releasing Windows Vista to the business community today, but it will be months, perhaps even years, before the software is widely deployed, according to industry analysts.
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Just one month after a BetaNews report led Windows chief Jim Allchin to explain his comments on Vista not needing antivirus software, an e-mail to Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer made public in court has him once again explaining his words.
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Slip of the tongue - or the brain Comment The UK Developer launch of Windows Vista and the 2007 Microsoft Office System was pretty impressive, as such things usually are.â¦
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A look back on Vista since Microsoft first released the consumer version of the latest Windows operating system.
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Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer each received total compensation of $901,667 in Microsoft Corp.'s 2004 fiscal year, up 4.4 percent from $863,447 one year ago.
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Microsoft Corp chief executive Steve Ballmer has called for financial analysts to cool down their predictions on how many copies of Windows Vista the company will sell.
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Microsoft Corp. on Tuesday released new test versions of what company co-founder Bill Gates called its three most important products: Windows Vista for desktop computers, Windows for servers and the Office business software suite.
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By Tamara Chuang, The Orange County Register, Calif.  Jan. 30--The anticipation is over. Windows Vista is finally here.