4 ms·

I won't defend Ballmer, but the guy was a salesman, a really good salesman. Not a technologist. Also Bill Gates was "chief software architect" during the Longh

• bad_user 8y ago
  In defense of the Longhorn/Vista blunder, the problem is that Windows XP was really good (at least compared to previous Windows versions), some would say good enough for people to not upgrade to newer versions ... if you remember, this was the first Win NT version meant for consumers. By comparison previously Win 3.x, 95, 98, ME, and in between were really unstable and frankly unusable in certain scenarios, I know because I used them all. I have a feeling that even now Windows XP is more popular than people think and that they aren't reporting the real number of Windows XP installs in the wild. So they were competing against themselves, against a previous version that has been wildly successful, enough so that virtually nobody upgraded it. I mean, besides people capable of assembling and upgrading their PCs, component by component, I'm pretty sure that everybody bought into Windows 7 and later via new PCs. And PCs becoming good enough to keep around for years, I think the writing was on the wall that Windows's revenue will eventually go down.