I always had a very clear idea why Vista failed, and both posts failed completely to grasp it.

Frequently, it is very easy to become blind to the everyday environment and do not see what is just staring at us.

For example, let's look at one single data point, the amount of memory in a computer:

- Windows 95 (1995) required at least 4Mb of RAM, but it was strongly recommended 8Mb (almost high-end at that time)

- Windows XP (2001) required 64Mb and recommended 128Mb; that was 16 times more RAM in around 5 years. And those time computers had increased accordingly.

- Windows Vista (2007) required 512Mb, but recommended 1Gb (32 bits) or 2Gb (64bits). Just notice that it was only 8 times more RAM.

- Windows 11 (on 2021) required 4Gb of RAM and 64bit, that is only 4 times more RAM in 14 years!

Do you see the progression? In the beginning, we were doubling the amount of memory of a computer every less than 2 years. If you did plan a new operating system to be released in the next four years, then you could plan to require at least 4 times more resources than the current mainstream. So, just without doing any optimization or effort, the released product would automatically become faster and more attractive.

But that did not happen.

Furthermore, it was only looking at the amount of memory. But if you look at any other performance number, you will realize that it was a main trend.

It turns out that a radical change in our vision of computers was happening. Memory and processor development hit a wall, their improvement started to change, and how we should use them changed. Multicore started to appear because it was really hard to extract more juice from one single core, and processor execution hertz (that mostly stopped to increase since 2005).

And that is the big failure that Microsoft had with Vista.

They bet that computers would continue evolved with the same trend from the last decades, but tit did not happen. They did not care about making a more efficient development because they relayed in the increase in resources. They assumed that they could be sloppy, take quick decisions, and just throw in as many things as they wanted because they thought that PCs would eventually support it. But the speed mostly became frozen, and the result was a complete failure of an operating system, too slow, too demanding for those days' computer standards, that nobody wanted.