Microsoft officially gives up on Vista

Chauncey Dupree
|
May 18, 2009
|
Share

Microsoft is giving up on Windows Vista:

"If you're just starting your testing of Vista, with the [Windows 7] Release Candidate and the quality of that offering, I would switch over and do your testing on the [Windows 7] Release Candidate, and use that going forward," Bill Veghte, Microsoft's senior vice president for Windows business, said in a keynote speech earlier this week.

But was this week's advice by Microsoft's Veghte a red-letter day, the implicit admission that Vista was a failure in the enterprise? "Oh, I think they admitted that a while ago," Silver said, pointing to comments by CEO Steve Ballmer last October during a Gartner symposium refereed by Silver and fellow analyst Neil MacDonald.

"If people want to wait [for Windows 7], they certainly can," Ballmer said then. Earlier in a question-and-answer, Ballmer had said Windows 7 was simply "Vista, a lot better."

"They've been coming to terms with Vista's [failure] long before this," Silver said today.

In the history of software, has anything ever bombed this badly?

 

Comments (16)

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | May 19, 2009 - 2:28am

RIP Micro$oft! LOL!

Baka Dubbs (not verified) | May 19, 2009 - 4:12am

You all do realize vista is running on more PC's than OSX... Not saying its a better OS, just saying its on a lot of PC's. I am currently running windows 7 on my gaming rig(calm yourselves, I also have a macbook) but had previously been running vista on the rig and never had a single issue. Vista isn't a bad OS, it was just released buggy and on some crap hardware that it wasn't designed for.

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | May 19, 2009 - 5:41am

it was released buggy, with bad drivers and BAAAAAD UI decisions - setting up a network in XP is easy even for BFU, in vista however, you end up in some kind of "labyrinth" with almost no additional features

Vaganza (not verified) | May 19, 2009 - 6:55am

Nobody complains about the fact they have Mac OS X on their Macs either.

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | May 19, 2009 - 4:25am

Vista is the suck. It's as simple as that. The whole world knows it and now Microsloth has finally admitted it.

Vaganza (not verified) | May 19, 2009 - 5:01am

Bombed this badly? You need only go back to Microsoft a few years ago to a product called Windows ME. And what about BOB?

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | May 21, 2009 - 10:38am

touche. ME was far far worse than vista

Freebies (not verified) | May 19, 2009 - 5:14am

I don't know anyone who has Vista and prefers it to XP so you gotta ask, what were MS doing when they tested Vista?

The Mac OS is far superior but we all know the story about that now dont we!

Attk | May 19, 2009 - 7:31pm

Maybe Win7 will be much less annoying... I've had some really stupid, hair-losing experiences on clients' Vista machines lately and have been ready to give up on it for a while!  Thank god i never bothered to install it on my own machines...  

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | May 19, 2009 - 8:47am

you forgot about microsoft BOB............... LOL

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | May 19, 2009 - 10:00am

Vista was an unholy bug-infested nightmare when it first arrived, but it's made huge strides since then. It hasn't been nearly so bad since SP1 was released. Most of the Vista critics are merely going along with the mass media prejudice which is based on earlier, and much worse, iterations of Vista.

safgsr (not verified) | May 20, 2009 - 7:09am

But it's pointless to point that out here because apple fanboys don't listen to anything positive about microsoft or anything negative about apple. It boggles my mind how people can live so biased and ignorant. It's fine because we're not talking about anything important, it's just technology. I wonder if these fools act this way with more important issues like ethics or religion.

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | May 19, 2009 - 10:19am

Microsoft has given up on the "Vista" brand, not the "Vista" product. They've simply renamed Vista to "7" and are now in the full court press that everybody should migrate to Windows 7 as soon as it's released, because it's the best operating system ever.

Craig Owen (not verified) | May 19, 2009 - 6:00pm

Leave it to Ballmer to come out with a statement like "Vista, a lot better." Heck, a dead rodent is a "lot better" than Vista, so its not much of an endorsement.

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | May 20, 2009 - 7:26pm

I love my Mac and have owned every Apple product line since the Apple ][+ (scary to admit it...) However, anyone ever bombed this bad? Well, Microsoft Vista is a pretty huge bomb, but it does have many millions of users as an installed base (who will quickly move to Windows7). Still, what about Copland? Apple's big software solution that never was. I suppose you can't bomb something that never launched....

And we got Mac OS X, which was clearly better, although I think we all know it is really a repackaged NeXT OS...

Consoleo (not verified) | May 20, 2009 - 7:41pm

I don't know what is worst..apple fanboys or xbox fanboys?

But good to see Vista is out of the picture finally..looking forward to testing Windows7