[Razor VinT]

More than a year after Windows Vista's release, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer this morning acknowledged some of the operating system's shortcomings -- calling it a "work in progress" during a speech to the company's Most Valuable Professionals conference in Seattle. He also acknowledged Windows XP's fans, but he stopped short of committing to further extend the older operating system's life.

Here's an extended excerpt from his comments on the topic:

Quote

Windows Vista: A work in progress. [Laughter, applause.] 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? 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't ever let that happen again. We had some things that we can't just set the dial back, but 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 that the battery life and that the compatibility, we're driving on the things that we need to drive hard to improve.

You can read more here.

[Frylock86]

I think any OS is a work in progress until the support cycle comes to an end.

[tominorlando]

With Windows 7 scheduled for release in 2010, it might be useful to view Vista as an interim release.

Just as Millennium Edition was.

Although I don't think Vista is anywhere near as bad as the worst Microsoft OS ever, it brings Ballmer's comments into focus on the future of M$ OS's.

By the way, does Microsoft support Millennium Edition anymore?

[Frylock86]

tominorlando, on Apr 18 2008, 11:16 PM, said:

With Windows 7 scheduled for release in 2010, it might be useful to view Vista as an interim release.

Just as Millennium Edition was.

Although I don't think Vista is anywhere near as bad as the worst Microsoft OS ever, it brings Ballmer's comments into focus on the future of M$ OS's.

By the way, does Microsoft support Millennium Edition anymore?

I don't think so. I think XP with SP 2 or 3 and Vista RTM and SP 1 are the only OSes Microsofts still supports.

Edit: According to Wikipedia, ME is unsupported as of July 11th 2006...

This post has been edited by Frylock86: 19 April 2008 - 12:18 AM

[tominorlando]

Thanks for the reply Frylock86
I was surprised that M$ supported ME that long.

This post has been edited by tominorlando: 19 April 2008 - 01:47 AM

[TheGreenMan]

Updating an OS is a continuous process, so every available OS can be labeled as work in progress.