Steve Ballmer’s Biggest Regret: Windows Vista

Virtually everyone that used a Windows Vista computer knew that it was a failure and now that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is looking back on his career, he feels the same way. According to Ballmer, his biggest regret as the CEO of Microsoft was the absolutely horrendoues operating system, Windows Vista.

According to Ballmer:

Oh, you know, I’ve actually had a chance to make a lot of mistakes, and probably because, you know, people all want to focus in on period A, period B, but I would say probably the thing I regret most is the, what shall I call it, the loopedy-loo that we did that was sort of Longhorn to Vista. I would say that’s probably the thing I regret most. And, you know, there are side effects of that when you tie up a big team to do something that doesn’t prove out to be as valuable.

It is not surprising that he would consider Vista to be the least successful Microsoft venture during his 33 year employment at the company, but there were some good times at Microsoft as well.

Steve Ballmer reflected upon some of the major successes he had while working for Microsoft over the past few decades:

I’m proud of being I would say a significant part even of the birth of intelligent personal computing, the notion that people use computing technologies, whether that’s phones, PCs…I would say a billion plus people and now more with phones, even if they’re not all our phones, I’m very proud of what we’ve accomplished there.

Despite working for Microsoft almost his entire life, Steve Ballmer will be completely removing himself from the company within the next 12 months leaving tons of room for speculation as to who will replace him as CEO of one of the largest tech companies in the world.

Who do you think will replace Steve Ballmer as CEO of Microsoft? And, was Windows Vista the biggest Microsoft failure during Ballmer’s time at the company?