I see Vista characterized as a failure over and over again, and Win 7 as a success. Win 7 is somewhat better than Vista, but the distance between them isn't that great. Besides the fact that UAC prompts were more frequent in Vista, was there some particular problem with Vista?

For a year or two there I was running workstations with both, and didn't see much difference.

I think Vista took the heat for imposing security where none existed.

It's the little things that add up, Vista is like Win7 with an itchy wool sweater over top. Win7 refined UAC, the quicklaunch/taskbar is amazing and the running task previews actually work, the start menu app search is better, the system tray notifications can be more finely tuned, and it runs significantly better on mid/lower end hardware.

I hardly notice a difference between Vista post SP1 and Win 7.

Vista had teething problems early on which burnt a lot of people. Unfortunately, that's what seems to be stuck in everyone's minds.

I ran both Vista and Windows 7. As far as I was concerned, in terms of usability they are both pretty much the same as long as you turned indexing off on you Vista drives.

Do you feel like Vista ran slower than 7? That was my issue with Vista, the new design was fine, but it just seemed to run poorly compared to the speed of 7.

The simple pattern is a popular myth. For ex, you didn't list Longhorn (after XP) that was such a fiasco that after 3 years of development it was completely scrapped. This was an overly ambitious release with a new relational db filesystem (winfs), new graphics stack (avalon), and new networking stack (indigo). It didn't converge. The team forked Windows Server 2003 and rushed out Vista with as much of the intention (but not code) as it could from previous development. I was on the windows team from 98-11.

That pattern only holds if you think that the world started at Windows XP. Going back another few years:

Windows 3.1 - Success

Windows 95 - Success

Windows 98 - Success (moderate, whatever)

Windows NT 4 - Success

Windows Me - Failure

Windows 2000 - Success

If you switch that metric from good/bad instead of success/failure, it makes more sense. Something doesn't have to have been objectively good to be sucessful.

Here's how I remember it:

3.1 was the first windows GUI for mass consumption, and was successful, and pretty decent for it's time.

95 was also succesful, but I remember it being very, terribly unstable. Moreso than 3.1.. i put it in the bad column based on that.

98 improved on this and added a lot. Good.

ME was utter dogshit.

Kernels changed from ME to XP, so I make the link there. Microsoft did provide a direct upgrade path from ME to XP.

XP was awesome

Vista was horrid.

7 was awesome

Now 8. If they continue the pattern, 8 will suck.

It seems like there's a micro pattern like "new UI paradigm" >> "polish and improve new UI". 98 improved on 95, 7 improved on vista, XP improved on 2K.

We're talking about Microsoft here! What about DOS?

I was talking about Windows, actually. I do remember some versions of MS-DOS being marginally better than others, but I don't think it had any predictable cadence.