Ballmer Blames the Failure of Windows Vista on Security
According to the Telegraph:
Mr Ballmer said: “We got some uneven reception when [Vista] first launched in large part because we made some design decisions to improve security at the expense of compatibility. I don’t think from a word-of-mouth perspective we ever recovered from that.”
Vista’s failure and Ballmer’s faulting security is a bit of being careful for what you wish. Vista (codename “Longhorn” during its development) was always intended to be a more secure operating system. Following the security disasters and 2000 and 2001 that befell Windows 98 and 2000, Microsoft shut down all software development and launched the Trustworthy Computing Initiative that advocated secure coding practices. Microsoft retrained thousands of programmers to eliminate common security problems such as buffer overflows. The immediate result was a retooling of Windows XP to make it more secure for its 2002 launch. Long-term, though, was to make Vista the most secure operating system in Microsoft’s history.
What made XP and Vista more secure? Eliminating (or reducing) buffer overflow errors helped. But what really made a difference is shutting off services by default. Many of the vulnerabilities exploited in Windows 98, NT and 2000 were actually a result of unused services that were active by default. Microsoft’s own vulnerability tracking shows that Vista has far less reported vulnerabilities than any of its predecessors. Unfortunately, a Vista locked down out of the box made it less palatable to users.
Now security obstacles aren’t the only ills that Vista suffered. Huge memory footprint, incompatible graphics requirements, slow responsiveness and a general sense that it was already behind competing Mac and Linux OSes in functionality and features made Vista thud. In my humble opinion, the security gains in Vista were worth many of the tradeoffs; and it was the other technical requirements and incompatible applications that doomed this operating system.
There was also the problem of Vista’s endless security warnings. The problem is that they were almost always false alarms, and there were no adverse effects of ignoring them. So users did, which means they ended up being nothing but an annoyance.
Security warnings are often a way for the developer to avoid making a decision. “We don’t know what to do here, so we’ll put up a warning and ask the user.” But unless the users have the information and the expertise to make the decision, they’re not going to be able to. We need user interfaces that only put up warnings when it matters.
I never upgraded to Vista. I’m hoping Windows 7 is worth upgrading to. We’ll see.
EDITED TO ADD (10/22): Another opinion.
richrumble • October 21, 2009 8:08 AM
There are less warnings in Win7, but the usability isn’t as good as XP(imho). I’ve been using it daily since the open-beta and I still have trouble finding locations I used to know cold. The compatibility is there, programs from XP/Win2k work well on win7, but so far I’m not a big fan of it’s administration interfaces. Windows is still bloated and maintains too much backward compatibility perhaps, I commented on this topic in an interview with the Mac Observer: http://www.macobserver.com/article/2005/07/21.14.shtml
-rich