this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2024
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Windows 7 was just vista with dipping sauce.
By the time 7 came out Vista was fine. Vista was the usual bugs of a new OS, plus the new drivers which most manufactures decided to not do properly so they made Vista look much worse than it actually was. The much higher system requirements really didn't help.
If you bought a new machine with hardware that came out post Vista's launch you probably had a good experience with Vista. I personally had 0 issues with my machine in 2008.
Vista paved the way for Win7 by highlighting the abysmal driver and support issues. Which got significant work done on it so by the time Win 7 acme out things were in a good state.
Vista was, much like ME, was a decent OS hampered by its time and hardware, but have been meme'd into festering shitpiles.
I'm on board with your Vista-->7 thoughts, but I do take issue with ME. It never was a decent OS and it very much was a steaming shitpile. It was far too much new code stupidly rushed for the holiday season. I remembering installing it being a roll of the dice even with the same hardware. It would work, then it wouldn't, then it might work with some odd issues, then it deffo would not at all. Hours wasted trying.
I really did try, but never had a good experience with WinME and I know of no one else who did. Even first Vista was better (though saying that makes me shudder).
Well, it was more than that.
I actually did an interview at MS about a year after Win7 was released (was fresh out of college), and I asked a pretty pointed question about why the release quality seemed so… variable. The manager’s answer was that they had done entirely in-house QA for XP (we didn’t go into WinMe), outsourced the vast majority for Vista, and brought it entirely back in house for 7. He further mentioned they were taking a hybridized approach for 8. I remember questioning the decision, given the somewhat clear correlation between release quality and QA ownership, and got some business buzzword gobbledygook (which I took as “the real answer is so far above my pay grade that I can do absolutely fucking nothing about it”).
TL;DR: it was largely just profit-driven quality cuts done too aggressively, so they had to backstep and reinvest a couple times to normalize it for the user base.
Vista's major problem was that it released during a time that the PC industry was racing to the bottom in terms of pricing. All those initial Vista machines were woefully inadequate for the OS they ran. 1-2GB RAM, which was perfectly fine for XP, was pathetic for Vista, yet they sold them anyway. If you bought a high-end machine, you likely had a pretty decent experience with Vista. If you bought a random PC at Walmart? Not so much.
Vista shows how important the initial reputation is. Everybody had made up their mind to hate it, even if the hate wasn’t fully justified. There wasn’t much Microsoft could do about it, other than releasing Windows 7.
Windows 8 on the other hand was genuinely bad.
I agree with reputation, but just made up their minds to hate it? That's a tough take. Design wise it looked cool and introduced the search bar. But there weren't enough benefits to switch. While on the cons side, it was a very heavy OS. In an age of 128 and 256mb of ram, vista needed 512 to function normally. That was a huge performance hit out of the gate. It didn't feel like an upgrade.
Even when computers did improve and became able to handle Vista people weren’t willing to change their minds about it. Windows 7 had a 1GB memory requirement. Why didn’t more people use Vista right before the Windows 7 launch?
That's where your comment about initial reputation kicks in. I'm in agreement with that. I'm just not in agreement the bad impression was unwarranted.
The talks about 7 at the time still pressed why an XP user would switch, since XP was a great OS and worked well without any glaring missing features. This is a reverse proof. The reputation of XP was so strong that it was still hard to get people to switch 2 OS versions later.
Just to add, Vista’s biggest change broke compatibility with so many applications with the implementation of User Access Control (UAC).
While it was a long-overdue feature for security, lots of older applications would either fail to install or not work properly because it expected to have full system access with no roadblocks. While there was compatibility mode, the results were still very much hit or miss.
Then there was the massive headache around the original implementation of UAC which would constantly go off, usually multiple times during a software installation and again when starting some applications. Most people would’ve turned off UAC because of how annoying it was.
Same with windows 8.1. It had to be replaced with 10.
And it was the OS that introduced UAC. Vista took a bullet for 7.