Todd Bishop's Microsoft Blog

Todd Bishop's Microsoft Blog: "Ballmer says Vista is a 'work in progress'

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:

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."