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Microsoft Employees Vent Anger Over Vista Delay

by , 3:35 PM EDT, April 10th, 2006

An anonymous Microsoft employee who calls himself "Mini-Microsoft" demanded in a March 21 blog post: "Vista 2007. Fire the leadership now!" His frustration over the Windows Vista delay led to more than 500 comments on the subject, many of them coming from Microsoft employees who also vented their anger anonymously.

"Vista's deployment is going to come from people buying CPUs with the OS pre-installed, not dancing down the CompUSA aisle as they clutch that boxed version of Vista to their loving chest," Mini-Microsoft wrote. "So not only did we miss last year's opportunity, we're missing this year's opportunity, too.

"With the convergence of high-tech media, this holiday season would have been an explosive nodal point to get Vista out for a compounded effect."

While most of the comments agreed with him, one visitor stopped by to say: "If you had spent the last 5 years of your life grinding away to get this thing out the door, you would have realized the only thing worse than slipping the date, would have been to lay a turd in August ... we'll be living with the Vista codebase for a long, long time. This is the right thing to do for the product ... At the end of this year, do you want Vista? Or do you want XP SP2 ME?"

On March 27, Mini-Microsoft followed up with a post in which he explained his rationale for the earlier diatribe: "I'm extremely passionate about Microsoft for doing this blogging intervention to put it back on track and live up to its potential." He also said that he raised the bar for comment approval, noting: "I'm just plain not interested in hosting your anti-Microsoft negativity."

Two days later, he opted for "a bit of a blog break [to] let things cool down here."

Observer Comments

Show: Subjects Only | Full Comments
Close Name:hangtown Posts: 109 Joined: 03 Dec 2005
Subject: I'm sure he does need a break

He'd better hope things do cool down before microsoft figures out his name. Most large companies have policies about posting things anonymously because it leads to people stating things about their companies that are not flattering, intentionally or otherwise.

I'm not saying I agree or disagree with his point of view, but I'm sure his blog post wasn't necessarily appreciated by microsoft management. He should definitely hope he remains anonymous.

View Name:Guest
Subject: Worse still
View Name:Guest
Subject: What the hell is a nodal?
View Name:Guest
Subject: Great Stuff
Close Name:Bosco Posts: 999 Joined: 03 Jun 2002
Subject: Wow!

I think they need to put Prozac in the rain in Redmond. Geez.

View Name:Guest
Subject: Ballmer Will Throw Another Chair at Him
Close Name:Rainy Day Posts: 607 Joined: 07 Jun 2005
Subject: The question is…

How do you have passion about a company like M$? Don’t you have to be deranged… or on psychedelic drugs?

Still, you can’t help but feel pity for a person who has fallen so low.

Close Name:geoduck Posts: 1805 Joined: 30 Dec 2003
Subject:

Reading through some of the comments I kept seeing a common point; Vista has had so many things promised and then dropped that now there's no compelling reason to upgrade from XP when it does arrive. This has been MS's problem for a number of years. In our office we haven't even finished moving from Win2000 to XP simply because functionally there's no pressing advantage to XP. We didn't even start installing XP until SP2 came out and I won't start installing Vista until SP1 and likely SP2 is out for it. MS has too long a history of "laying a turd" and then fixing it with service packs. So I don't see Vista being a huge success. MS will crow about initial sales but it won't be a Win95 stampede.

BTW several comments mentioned "Client appcompat %". I'm not a coder and don't work for MS so does anyone know what that means?

View Name:Guest
Subject: as the devil's advocate
View Name:Guest
Subject: Passion about Money, not products...
Close Name:brett_x Posts: 319 Joined: 24 Jan 2006
Subject: Wow

Wow. A blogger has an opinion. You should write an article about that.

View Name:Guest
Subject: Re: devil's advocate
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