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His biggest mistake...next to firing anyone with the intelligence, vision and balls to talk him out of it.
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And ME wasn't on his watch? What about the Ribbon? 
modified 11-Dec-13 23:29pm.
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I'm sorry: Vista was his biggest mistake? You're kidding me.
Vista was a mess because it was so late and they handled the bad publicity terribly, but they recovered quickly and produced their best OS ever in Windows 7. Windows 8 was not only hamstrung and driven on the road side of the road (to mix metaphors) by internal politics, they haven't recovered with Windows 8.1. Worse: their timing of releasing it on the crest of a move towards tablets and mobile devices was truly awful and it has directly contributed to a decline in PC sales for the first time ever.
I can't help but think there's a little stock-price concern in his reticence to name the current selling Windows OS as his biggest mistake. Regardless of the technical merits of Windows 8 and the need for an OS to move forward and keep up with hardware, I feel the handling of the Windows 8 product has been a much larger issue for Microsoft than Vista ever was.
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Sorry, don't agree. Windows 8 is way better than Vista. People need to get over the start menu/screen bullshiite.
I agree trading the start menu for the start screen/menu was a stupid decision. Even so, I find Windows 8 eminently as usable and even more performant and stable than Windows 7. I have been using windows 8 daily for my job for over a year.
If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.-John Q. Adams
You must accept one of two basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not alone in the universe. And either way, the implications are staggering.-Wernher von Braun
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.-Albert Einstein
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Upvoted.
Personally, I like the Start screen better than the Start menu. Cascading menus is not a great user experience. The fact is that people are used to it.
I'm not saying the Start screen is great. That would be subjective anyway. But, for my mileage, the Start screen is faster and keeps the noise out of the way. For example, SQL Server creates two separate folders and a dozen or so icons. All of which I almost never need to use. The Start Menu lets me hide all of that. I have quick access to what I need.
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tgrt wrote: subjective
Absolutely.
tgrt wrote: The fact is that people are used to it.
Yes, so let us continue to use it if we choose. Same with menues, we who prefer menues should be able to continue using them.
tgrt wrote: The Start Menu lets me hide all of that. I have quick access to what I need.
Yes indeed, and I can even right-click to run as administrator or another user.
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PIEBALDconsult wrote: Yes, so let us continue to use it if we choose. Same with menues, we who prefer menues should be able to continue using them.
When windows 95 came out, people were also complaining about how you could not circumvent the (system heavy) GUI and that the cmd was a crappy version of DOS while Windows was still hogging resources in the background.
In the end, I don't think it was a bad decision because thanks to Windows you don't have to worry so much about being cross compatible with all the different drivers; which has been a huge step forward in software development on the PC. And saying that command-lines are better because multitasking is pointless would be a bold statement nowadays; but people were pretty serious about that back then.
Windows 8 is also a big step forward in usability and trying to create the same standard for desktop and mobile devices is a good decision. That people aren't used to it and therefor complaining, is a passing thing.
Also, there are alternatives to Windows. Ubuntu, ChromeOS/Android, Mac... It's not like really have no choice.
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0bx wrote: When windows 95 came out ... could not circumvent the ... GUI
Of course you could, also in Windows 98. I always booted 98 (I never used 95) to the command line and only started Windows when I needed to.
0bx wrote: command-lines are better
That depends on the task. I spend most of my day working at the command line even today, because it's more suited for the tasks I have.
0bx wrote: multitasking
Multitasking isn't the issue, the interface is.
0bx wrote: Also, there are alternatives to Windows
In this room I have more OpenVMS systems than Windows systems.
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You can also just stay with an older version of the OS till they End of support for it too.
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I don't care whether Windows 8 is better or worse than Vista as a product. What I see is that uptake of Windows 8, and general consumer reaction, has been terrible, and their efforts to address this were far worse than what they did for Vista.
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Chris Maunder wrote: general consumer reaction, has been terrible
And was driven by poorly managed PR and poor advertising. (Dancing Surface Pros? Give me a break.) In fact, the reviews were ignored by M$ and never really addressed. That was Balmer's poor decision, not Windows 8 / Metro / Start Screen.Chris Maunder wrote: their efforts to address this were
non-existent.
So I guess we agree on something. 
If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.-John Q. Adams
You must accept one of two basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not alone in the universe. And either way, the implications are staggering.-Wernher von Braun
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.-Albert Einstein
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Exactly. The Windows 8 launch, consumer reaction and subsequent followup are, to me, a far bigger mess than the Vista mess ever was.
The thing is I never really got why everyone hated Vista.
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Chris Maunder wrote: I never really got why everyone hated Vista
UAC.
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And drivers. The OEMs dragged their feet on drivers, which were the biggest source of stability issues with Vista.
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I think most of the problems were with the way UAC sometimes silently broke things or the errors returned were totally misleading.
Also the file and registry virtualization caused problems.
I did not like the beta and it took some time to learn the in’s and out’s of Vista to get along with the UAC and virtualization problems that were introduced.
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Longhorn-Vista? He's being modest. I like this one:
“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share.”
Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO (April 2007)
Peter Wasser
Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.
Frank Zappa
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I prefer Vista over Windows 7. It's look and feel is closer to XP 
I can't stand Windows 8, It just doen't work the way I do.
I hate the swipeing which is why I still have an 8 year old cell phone. and No tablet.
I don't want to have to remember shorcut keys or type in a search term to navigate around it.
I have no Need for windows store Applications.(so far)
I'm not on all of the Social networks. or play games all of the time.
The dull flat ugly look makes me want to throw up just looking at it.
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Glassdoor has announced our sixth annual Employees’ Choice Awards, honoring the 50 Best Places to Work, and new for 2014, the 50 Best Medium-Sized Companies to Work For. Winners were determined by the people who know these companies best — their employees. C'mon, CodeProject should be at least in the top 10
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I guess you need to post more astroturf reviews on their site next year. 
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Microsoft is considering making Windows Phone and Windows RT available free of charge to device makers. "Give away the razors, sell the blades"
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Today, we are announcing a new service that makes it easier than ever to import your Gmail account to Outlook.com. This will be rolling out to everyone over the coming weeks, so if you don't have access to it yet, check back soon. "Growing frustration with outdated email services". Cute, Microsoft, cute.
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OTOH the hard part is still going to 10k other sites and switching your account info to your new address on them.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Dan Neely wrote: 10k other sites
Really? you have that many? I realize that's an exaggeration you're using to indicate "a lot", but still...
I've only around half-a-dozen that I care about and even some of those I use a junk email address as my login. The others that I don't care about, and visit once-in-a-lifetime, I use another junk email address and forget about it.
My wife and I each have an outlook account (which both switched for me by M$ from hotmail) and I really don't like it as much as gmail.
If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.-John Q. Adams
You must accept one of two basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not alone in the universe. And either way, the implications are staggering.-Wernher von Braun
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.-Albert Einstein
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ahmed zahmed wrote: Really? you have that many? I realize that's an exaggeration you're using to indicate "a lot", but still...
Probably; but switching accounts over as I used them was major PITA for a few months; and I was still finding occasional accounts tied to my legacy provider several years after I moved my primary account to gmail.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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