Windows Vista, every mention
51 scenes · ← back to Windows Vista
tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone David Rosenthal 24Ben Gilbert 24Steve Ballmer 3
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Windows Vista comes up
Google Part II: Alphabet (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 20:31 David Rosenthal Microsoft's distracted with the albatross that was Longhorn that would become Windows Vista.
- ▶ 3:28:14 David Rosenthal This was Google's Windows Longhorn slash Windows Vista.
- ▶ 3:28:19 David Rosenthal In our Microsoft saga, we talked about how Vista slash Longhorn was the most damaging thing to the company because of the distraction and the siphoning of resources and the best talent away from working on what really mattered.
- ▶ 3:28:45 David Rosenthal Like, the whole reason Microsoft let Google fester from their perspective for all these years and didn't kneecap them was they were tied up with all the distraction from Vista.
The Steve Ballmer Interview · Acquired
- ▶ 25:04 Steve Ballmer We couldn't make the mistake we sort of made, uh, in the thing that became Vista Vista.
- ▶ 1:55:33 Steve Ballmer The toughest time was probably the ship of Vista.
- ▶ 1:57:55 Ben Gilbert And he's working on Longhorn at this point, because it's post XP.
- ▶ 1:58:00 Steve Ballmer Longhorn was a big mistake.
- ▶ 1:59:09 Ben Gilbert Vista.
Microsoft Volume II: The Complete History and Strategy of the Ballmer Years (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:33:44 Ben Gilbert And then we're gonna talk about Vista, and then we're gonna talk about Zune, and Search, and Bing, and Windows Mobile, and Windows Eight, and yeah, all that.
- ▶ 2:15:02 Ben Gilbert So, there's a little tail off of XP that'll lead to Vista.
- ▶ 2:15:22 Ben Gilbert The ski mountain right next to Whistler is, yes, Blackcomb, which became the name for the theoretical release that they wanted to do, like, just a year or two after Vista.
- ▶ 2:16:36 David Rosenthal Longhorn, baby.
- ▶ 2:16:50 David Rosenthal So I remember being like a teenager in high school at this point in time, and reading all about Longhorn, Blackcomb, all this stuff on the internet, you know, on these new tech sites, these blogs, being like,
- ▶ 2:17:05 David Rosenthal I remember downloading, like, new shells for Windows XP to mimic the Longhorn UI with the sidebar and the clock on the side.
- ▶ 2:17:17 Ben Gilbert Well, this was part of the belief behind Longhorn.
- ▶ 2:17:33 Ben Gilbert And so everyone got really well versed in what was coming in Longhorn.
- ▶ 2:17:38 Ben Gilbert And then everyone was kind of sitting on their hands like, where's Longhorn?
- ▶ 2:17:42 Ben Gilbert They've been really telling us about Longhorn in a way that you would never see today.
- ▶ 2:18:21 Ben Gilbert Anyway, Longhorn is teased for five years.
- ▶ 2:18:35 Ben Gilbert David, what was the initial technical spark that was supposed to be the cornerstone of Longhorn?
- ▶ 2:18:54 David Rosenthal And then they were like, no, no, we're going to pare it down to Longhorn, but it all ended up getting added back into Longhorn.
- ▶ 2:20:06 Ben Gilbert But, if you did buy a nice PC, and you did eventually end up with a copy of Windows Vista, this is why you got to see the new, what, ah,
- ▶ 2:22:07 David Rosenthal And what you're talking about here is the third pillar of Longhorn slash Blackcomb, which is WinFS, right?
- ▶ 2:23:24 Ben Gilbert They never built Longhorn.
- ▶ 2:23:59 David Rosenthal So, okay, Longhorn Vista, this is truly a disaster for the company.
- ▶ 2:25:19 Ben Gilbert Even as late as 2009, so three and a half years after launch, something like that, three quarters of corporate PCs are still running XP and had never upgraded to Vista.
- ▶ 2:25:32 David Rosenthal You may have this in your notes, but Microsoft OEMs were so unhappy because consumers didn't want to buy Vista machines.
- ▶ 2:27:06 David Rosenthal One, so when Vista actually shipped, just sort of, you know, process-wise, it was, Ben, as you're saying, a complete reset.
- ▶ 2:27:15 David Rosenthal So, Brian Valentine comes over from Exchange, you know, in Windows Server in the enterprise world to take over managing, getting something out the door and just cut all the features, cut all the pillars of the Windows Longhorn vision.
- ▶ 2:28:30 David Rosenthal When you're a CEO, you have to engage with your OEM partners, you have to engage with enterprises, you have to engage with customers, and not that it's all Bill's fault by any means, but this Longhorn Black Home disaster, Ben, as you say,…
- ▶ 2:29:48 David Rosenthal At the same time as Vista actually is coming out in late
- ▶ 2:31:06 Ben Gilbert Market share is rising, and Microsoft comes out with Vista.
- ▶ 2:31:19 David Rosenthal This sets the stage for the iPhone, because Apple now, in stark contrast to Vista and with these ads, is training consumers with the benefits and the joy of it just works.
- ▶ 2:32:36 Ben Gilbert Who is writing Vista apps?
- ▶ 2:33:07 David Rosenthal Nobody is writing Vista apps, but the only people left who are writing Windows apps period are enterprise developers writing custom software for enterprises.
- ▶ 2:33:32 David Rosenthal Facebook is not writing a, ah, Windows Vista app.
- ▶ 2:33:37 Ben Gilbert So, the biggest things to hurt Microsoft coming out of Vista are what we just talked about losing developers, what we just talked about losing users.
- ▶ 2:33:48 Ben Gilbert I mean, consumers who are excited to buy a computer, they're just not excited to buy a Windows Vista PC.
- ▶ 2:33:59 Ben Gilbert I mean, Vista was a black hole.
- ▶ 2:34:26 Ben Gilbert I mean, IE is peaking and about to start falling off a cliff and are completely consumed by Vista.
- ▶ 2:34:46 Ben Gilbert Vista consumed a bunch of the smartest people, even if they had the right vision to be chasing, and the DOJ had just crippled
- ▶ 2:34:59 David Rosenthal In that conversation that we had with Steve, where he, you know, made the comment about my acquisitions, my mistakes, we just lost money on the bad ones, the genesis of that conversation was about Vista.
- ▶ 2:35:41 David Rosenthal And he goes and spends two years getting Vista out the door and then goes to Amazon.
- ▶ 3:22:10 David Rosenthal After the Vista disaster, he gets drafted to come over and run Windows.
- ▶ 3:22:44 David Rosenthal That's what Longhorn was.
- ▶ 3:23:10 Ben Gilbert Or it's like Vista without all that random stuff and all the regressions that Vista had.
- ▶ 3:30:36 Ben Gilbert And what you have is not as bad as Vista, but man, the rollout was pretty bungled.
- ▶ 3:42:27 David Rosenthal He had experience both in the enterprise server and tools products, and Amitabh was also a big part of getting Vista out the door with Brian Valentine before Brian left for Amazon.
- ▶ 4:21:25 David Rosenthal I mean, the Blackcomb Longhorn Vista thing illustrates that.
- ▶ 4:31:18 Ben Gilbert And so in the IBM days, you know, you had Windows and OS II, and in the internet era, you had, like, the web browser versus all the interactive TV stuff, or Longhorn, which was supposed to be little and iterative, versus Blackcomb, which…