What Really Happened with Vista

Too Long; Didn't Read

I generally have posted about things that I have been directly involved with — either code I wrote or projects I managed. In this post I am taking a different tack to write about my perspective on the underlying causes of the Windows Vista (codename Longhorn) debacle. While this happened over a decade ago, this was a crucial period in the shift to mobile and had long-running consequences internally to Microsoft. I have found many of the descriptions of Microsoft’s problems, especially around the shift to mobile, to be unconvincing and not to mesh with my understanding or experience of what went wrong. Vanity Fair’s article <a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2012/08/microsoft-lost-mojo-steve-ballmer" target="_blank">Microsoft’s Lost Decade</a>, ascribed it to bureaucratic rot and infighting (“life&nbsp;… had become staid and brutish”) or culture rot due to the negative effects of a competitive stack ranking evaluation system. A <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/08/how-goliaths-beat-themselves-microsofts-mobile-failure-and-the-innovators-dilemma/279143/" target="_blank">more recent article</a> in The Atlantic describes it as a classic “Innovator’s Dilemma” story.