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As PC users clamor for Microsoft to continue to support Windows XP, company CEO Steve Ballmer called the Vista OS "a work in progress" at an annual Seattle event on Thursday.

"It's a very important piece of work. We did a lot of things right and have a lot of things we need to learn from. You never want to let five years go between releases," he said.

While Microsoft recently extended the date when the XP software will be available for low-cost PCs, it doesn't plan to listen to some other complaints, including that Vista is too big. "Vista is bigger than XP and it's gonna stay bigger than XP," Ballmer said. "We have to make sure it doesn't get bigger still."

During the lively session, peppered with flag waving by a rowdy group of Canadians, hoots and applause, Ballmer spoke about a few other key areas that the company will focused on in the near future. "It's virtualization time for Microsoft," he said. "We're gonna make sure we democratize virtualization." Probably less than 5 percent of servers in the world are virtualized today, he said. "It's too darn expensive and too hard to manage. We intend to take major strides around addressing both of those."

He also said to expect more work from Microsoft in the search market. "There's an opportunity to knock the socks off in terms of innovation," he said.

Once Microsoft introduces some blog services later this year, Ballmer intends to ask its MVPs (Most Valuable Professionals) to switch their default searches to Live Search for one week. After that week, he'll ask for their feedback about what they liked and what they didn't, as part of a broad effort to improve Microsoft's third-place standing in the search market.

Another key area for the future of Microsoft is services. Overall, the use of hosted services worldwide is small, but Ballmer expects that in two to three years there will be an inflection point after which millions of people will use hosted services, he said.

There are 4,000 Microsoft MVPs around the world, and nearly 1,800 of them gathered in Seattle this week for an annual summit. MVPs are technology experts who provide feedback to Microsoft about its products -- Ballmer said they are his favorite group to address.

The topics Ballmer tackled during his talk were sometimes similar, but much broader compared to the big issue that he, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Microsoft's founders, discussed while beginning to develop software at Harvard University. "Our strategy and mission have expanded," Ballmer said. In the very beginning, year after year, Allen would approach Gates with the idea to start building computers. And each time Gates sagely said, 'No, Paul, we're not hardware guys,'" Ballmer said. "We're on that same strategy 30 years later ... but we do have an expansive vision."

Source: http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/144773/ballmer_vista_is_a_work_in_progress.html

Exactly. But now that it is out there is nothing they can really do besides, just trash it, do a second release of XP, like they did with windows 98. They start all over with windows 7.

ok but when again is the projected release date? 2010-12? There really going to suffer in that time.

I don't think that things are going to sway that much, and as has already been said, the " crap hype " about Vista being  " crappy" is just that. Get a machine that will handle new goodies, and you'll be fine.  M$ is pushing the hardware market into the future, or should I say forcing it.  Nothing new here.

 Dude, all the macs are good, you don't have to gat the top of the line to experience the fastest most stable , reliable operating system .   You should see this old iBook G4,   1.33 GHz / 512 ram / ppc , she screams , because of the unix based OS, it doesn't " bloat " as windows will w/ the registry, w/ unix, the OS actually grows larger, VS. sideways. So instead of searching through mounds of chopped up left over reg keys, it just looks to the end, wow , there it is  : )

well, that's just an expression when I said "need money". Businesses wants their "returns" from the cost they have invested in that business. On this case, they invested to make the "vista".

No companies would love to see their money go to waste and somehow they want to earn something back somehow. If they can't get their full investment back after a few years, then that's how they will just write it off a "losses". But if they still can make money out of it, "great" for them.

Any business would love to get as much profit as they want. They don't really care if they have a crappy service or not.

Its like saying   "We can't take Windows XP out of Microsoft, Microsoft takes Windows XP out of us"  Steve Ballmer admits that it would be a catastrophe for millions, if not BILLIONS of people who uses Windows XP for everyday purposes.


 LOUVAIN-LA-NEUVE, Belgium - Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer offered a glimmer of hope on Thursday to fans of the company's Windows XP operating system, saying the company may reconsider its decision to stop selling it soon.

But Ballmer was adamant that most people who buy PCs today buy them with XP's successor, Vista.

"That's the statistical truth," he told reporters at a news conference at Louvain-La-Neuve University. "If customer feedback varies, we can always wake up smarter."

Fans of XP — the six-year-old operating system set to be pulled off store shelves by June 30 — have plastered the Internet with blog posts, cartoons and petitions recently. They trumpet its superiority to Vista, whose consumer launch in January was greeted with lukewarm reviews.

Ballmer said the customers buying PCs with XP are corporate information technology departments that are having trouble shifting old machines to newer technology.

Some 160,000 people already have signed an online Save XP Web petition who want Microsoft to keep selling it until the next version of Windows is released, currently targeted for 2010.

On another issue, Ballmer said he was very confident that Microsoft's offer for Yahoo Inc. was "a very good price. Microsoft has set a Saturday deadline for Yahoo to accept its offer or face a proxy battle.

Microsoft has threatened to oust Yahoo's board if the 10 directors don't accept the current offer Saturday. That risky course of action, known as a proxy contest, probably wouldn't be settled until Yahoo's shareholder meeting, which doesn't have to be held until July.

The cash-and-stock bid is now worth about $42.7 billion.

Ballmer also refused to say if the company plans to appeal a fine of 899 million euros ($1.3 billion) that the European Union levied in February.

Microsoft has until the first week of May to launch a legal challenge against the EU decision that it had not obeyed a 2004 antitrust order to share technical information with rivals so that their programs would work better with Windows.

Joking with the media and even breaking into good French, Ballmer acknowledged that he's finding it hard to keep up with social networking on the Facebook Web site.

"I do have a profile on Facebook," he said. "It's hard to keep up. I get many friend requests from people I don't know."

"There's about 10 Steve Ballmers and I'm only one of them. I'm the one who actually has a picture that looks like me on it!" he said. "I'm hitting a golf ball, that's the real Steve Ballmer."

He was in Belgium to open a Microsoft innovation center in the southern city of Mons that hopes to boost new startups in the country, creating some 200 jobs over the next three years.


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