Ballmer Tells Microsoft MVPs Vista is a ''Work in Progress''

Jack Writes: Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system has been on the market for consumers for a little over a year now. During that time, the operating system has seen its fair share of both praise and criticism.

As is customary with Windows operating systems that have been on the market for roughly a year, Microsoft recently released the first Service Pack for Vista. Service Pack 1 (SP1) addressed a number of shortcomings with the operating system and rolled in a number of hotfixes and patches that have been released via Windows Update over the past year.

Now that Vista has had some time to establish itself in the marketplace and receive a fresh boost of energy with SP1, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is now reflecting on the operating system.

"Windows Vista: A work in progress," said Ballmer to a crowd of Microsoft MVPs in Seattle. "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?"

Ballmer went on to add, "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."

Ballmer also noted that there are plenty of happy customers of the Windows Vista operating system as well as Windows XP. He remarked that he has received emails from staunch supporters of the Windows XP operating system, but declined to give any indications that Microsoft would go any further than its intention to provide Windows XP Home to ultra-low-cost PCs (ULPCs) until June 2010.

Windows Vista has been in the news quite frequently in the past few weeks. A week ago, David Cross, a product manager responsible for designing Vista's User Account Control (UAC) exclaimed that Microsoft designed the feature to "annoy users".

More recently, Microsoft's Eric Ligman went off on a rant over the inference that Microsoft purposely included a loophole in Vista to allow consumers and businesses to install a full version of the operating system with an upgrade disc.