"Advertisers, advertisers, advertisers..." --
Steve Ballmer
Summary: Microsoft's large circle of self-serving liars is shown for what it really has been and how history repeats itself
WINDOWS VISTA was a disaster. To say this used to be a taboo but now it's the consensus. How come? Well, it's called PR.
Microsoft knew that Vista was bad, but it whitewashed the media as long as it could afford it (bribed bloggers, denials, and so on). Based on
unsealed internal E-mails, they knew Vista was a pile of garbage, but they had to carry on smiling and lying to the public about their product.
Now that Microsoft has
a replacement for Vista out the door (it's similar to Vista in many ways), Microsoft's CEO says that
Microsoft wasted time on Vista. But wait. Just over a year ago he
said: "we're not going to have products that are much more successful than Vista has been." Is Ballmer schizophrenic or just an opportunistic liar?
In a chat with fellow CEOs at Microsoft's 14th annual CEO Summit, Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer came close to admitting Vista was a dog.
Here is
another report about it:
During the speech, Ballmer took an honest-yet-surprising turn and admitted that Microsoft fell short with Windows Vista. "We tried too big a task and in the process wound up losing thousands of man hours of innovation," Ballmer said. He added that Microsoft spent too many years building the Windows Vista operating system, but then paused to question about the appropriate time frame for research and development.
Our reader Tim has said: "That's not what your advocates said at the time....
"When's the Windows 7 confession Ballmer? Or is it "different" this time? To me its always "different" until you want to flog something new."
Tim later wrote
this blog post on the subject. He covered key points about the
AstroTurfing.
Remember the comments we highlighted here in regards to Vista from the Microsoft faithful at the time? Complete denial of any problems and in fact we highlighted many comments such as “Vista is loved” or it being a “gift to the world”…I ask any Windows user here to think back to that time (and Im emailed by Windows users so I know they read this) and say, if MS Faithful were praising the Vista product then and now Ballmer admits this, what worth can you put into the voice of any Microsoft Advocate? – I’ll let you decide and Microsoft’s catalogue is eaten away by the plethora of alternatives.
We too remember very well how Vista was praised in the press in its early days. Recently we showed more and more of the creases and wrinkles of Vista 7, including
major security bugs in Aero. Yes,
even Aero is a security issue now [
via]. Vista 7 is a new brand for another piece of junk that only meets a market with better- or higher-specked PCs. These PCs in turn become more powerful zombies that make up destructive botnets which the
FTC needs to decommission at taxpayers' expense.
The Federal Trade Commission today got a judge to effectively kill off the Internet Service Provider 3FN who the agency said specialized in spam, porn, botnets, phishing and all manner of malicious Web content.
The ISP's computer servers and other assets have been seized and will be sold by a court and the operation has been ordered to give back $1.08 million to the FTC.
For a reminder of Vista 7's security problems, see the links below. We addressed the lies about Vista security
over two years ago.
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Comments
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2010-05-21 22:29:41
I have something better than a log of Vista launch hype, a collection of articles by prominent tech writers apologizing for saying that Vista was anything other than a broken pig. All of the majors, including the Microsoft controlled press are represented because all of them hyped the disaster which Microsoft was unable to fix. One even resigned over it.
Microsoft people, sadly, never learn. Windows 7 is a parody of the "Mojave Project" so not only are they recycling the same old code they had the nerve to do tell you about it in their advertisements beforehand. Many of same people who hyped Vista are now falling overthemselves to make the same mistake with Windows 7.
Happily, everyone else has learned that upgrades are not inevitable and that life is possible without Windows. People who have run XP for nearly a decade know that they don't need another version of Windows to get their work done. People who had the good sense to leave Windows behind are have been happy all along and now their choice looks like the only sensible one that can be made.
Soon we will see that Windows 7 has even less market share than Vista does. Microsoft is always loudest before the real news comes out. Keep up the good work, Roy, I look forward to reading and logging the failure of Windows 7.