Mary Jo Foley conducted what may be Steve Ballmer's final press interview while he is still CEO of Microsoft in late November. The major parts of that chat were posted today at CNN's Fortune website but Foley has some expanded portions of her chat with Ballmer on her ZDNet column today as well. In one of those columns, Ballmer expanded on his own previously admitted regrets over the treatment of Longhorn, the code name for the Windows XP successor that eventually was released as Windows Vista in 2007. Ballmer is quoted again today about the Longhorn-Vista efforts, saying, "That was the single biggest mistake I made."

Not only because the product wasn't a great product, but remember it took us five or six years to ship it. Then we had to sort of fix it. That was what I might call Windows 7. And what we wound up with (was) a period of let's say seven or eight years where we had the A-team -- not all of the A-team but a bunch of our best people -- tied up not driving. We did not make years progress in eight years, and there were other things those people could have been working on, (like) phones.

Ed.note: Vista, if you followed it from the earliest of days in the build, was ambitious and made huge leaps into new areas. At the end, they had to ship an OS and they couldn't complete what the initial vision was. What was left was a mere shadow of what the plan was. Even Windows 7, which I would argue is their best OS to date, didn't complete the goals they set out for themselves with Vista.