Windows Vista was the successor of Windows XP, and was released in November of 2006. Many were excited for its release, but their joyful enthusiasm was not met with a great product. Windows Vista was coined as “Microsoft’s biggest failure,” but why?

Vista was slow

For years, Microsoft has had a reputation for “software bloat”; Microsoft added an immense amount of features and detail, which made the code massive. This bloatware was never a problem for sales with previous Microsoft softwares, but this was not the case when it came to Vista. Vista alone had 50 million lines of code, 10 million lines more than its successor, Windows 7. Because of the excessive amount of bloat and code, it was very slow on devices at the time, even on the latest and greatest hardware of 2007. This meant that it was more expensive to buy a machine that ran Vista properly.

Windows XP was heavily rooted

When XP was released in 2001, there were about 600 million Windows computers in use worldwide. 80% out of 600 million computers were split into two Windows operating systems, Windows 95/98 (65%) and Windows NT (25%). The goal of XP was to combine both those two operating system, and Microsoft successfully accomplished that. Fast forward to 2008, there are now 1.1 billion computers in use worldwide, 80% of them using Windows XP. That’s around 800 million computers, making it the most widely installed operating system. This is a lot of computers, and with many IT companies using their programs and applications on XP, it was hard to switch to Vista.
In fact, Windows XP managed to increase its market share in the next couple years by running the operating system on cheap laptops and desktops. While these devices were powerful enough to provide a reasonable experience on XP, they were not capable of running resource-hungry Vista.

Incompatibility Issues

Incompatibility was huge. When XP was released, it combined the Windows 9x and the NT softwares. This meant that you had the powerful hardware, software, and driver support from 9x and the stability of the NT line. Microsoft didn’t think much about compatibility for Vista. Many prevailing software and hardware were incompatible, although Vista had a fairly long beta period. This made it harder for IT companies to adapt to Vista and many computer peripherals were practically useless.
In the early 2000s, Microsoft was attacked by a string of worms and malware. This forced Microsoft to initiate the Trustworthy Computing program to make its products secure. This caused compatibility issues with Vista.

There were several valid reasons to upgrade to Windows XP: the seamless integration of the Windows 9x line (Win95/98) and the NT line (server-in-mind designed OS), exceptional hardware and software compatibility, and a stable operating system. There aren’t as many compelling arguments to upgrade from XP to Vista, as Vista was basically XP, except buggy and slow. Vista did have a lot of problems, but believe it or not, good things did come out of it. The futuristic design of Vista was ahead of its time. And through Vista, Microsoft corrected their mistakes and errors to create the ever popular Windows 7.