Windows Vista

» see microsoft.com/windows/vista as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

vista landed on every new laptop sold in turkey in early '07. i was twenty-three at university in ankara, on a fresh ttnet adsl line at home, and the question of which windows to run had a clear answer for the first time in years. it just was not the answer microsoft wanted. people who could downgrade back to xp did. people who could not, suffered through about eight months of driver problems before windows 7 was even on the roadmap.

the codename was longhorn. announced in 2001 as the next windows after xp, originally promised for '03, slipped to '04, slipped again. by '04 microsoft did a development reset and threw out most of the original longhorn codebase because the project had grown into something nobody could ship. the new plan kept aero glass, kept the search indexer, dropped winfs, dropped most of the avalon-as-shell ambition. that reset is the reason vista shipped five and a half years after xp instead of three.

the rtm was november '06 for volume licensing, retail january 30, '07. that night was the launch event in turkey at a few electronics stores, with discount upgrade pricing on the home premium sku. the box art was a transparent sheet that nobody quite knew what to do with on the shelf. i remember a friend's father buying a new laptop a week later that came with vista home basic preloaded, which was the sku without aero, which meant he paid for vista and got an xp visual experience with worse performance.

the driver story was the thing that broke people's experience. honestly, microsoft had rewritten the audio stack, the print stack, the graphics driver model. all of which meant every printer and sound card and graphics card from before '07 needed a new driver written from scratch by the manufacturer. some manufacturers did the work. many did not, especially for hardware older than two or three years. people who upgraded a working xp pc to vista in '07 frequently lost the ability to print or scan, with no fix coming. the resentment from that experience colored the entire reputation of the release.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rise ~

vista did eventually find a user base. by '09 microsoft was reporting around 330 million users worldwide, which was more than xp had at the equivalent point in its lifecycle. the security improvements were real. uac, when you stopped being annoyed at it, did stop a lot of malware that had walked freely on xp. bitlocker on the enterprise side was the first usable full-disk encryption microsoft shipped. the search indexer in the start menu was an obvious improvement that windows 7 inherited unchanged. on paper the technical wins were significant.

the problem was that nobody felt the wins because every interaction with vista on day one had been a uac prompt asking whether you really wanted to copy a file to the program files folder. by the time the patches and the driver updates landed and the experience smoothed out, the public verdict was already locked in. microsoft kept shipping service packs (sp1 in '08, sp2 in '09) but the brand was beyond repair.

~ the funny part ~

microsoft did the mojave experiment in '08 where they showed vista to focus groups under a fake name and recorded their positive reactions, then revealed it was just vista. that ad campaign read as defensive in a way that made the situation worse. you do not run a fake-name test on your own operating system unless you have already lost the argument with the press. honestly, the mojave campaign is now mostly remembered as the moment microsoft conceded the perception problem.

~ the postmortem ~

windows 7 shipped october '09. it was vista with the bugs fixed, the driver model stabilized, the uac prompt dialed back to something tolerable, and a new taskbar. people upgraded in numbers within months. by '11 vista was already the version nobody talked about anymore, sandwiched between xp's long tail and 7's enthusiasm. mainstream support ended april 10, '12, only five years after retail. extended support carried it to april 11, '17, which is the technical death date. any vista machine still running after that has been off the patch tier for nine years.

the reputation never recovered. in retrospective rankings of windows releases by tech press, vista usually sits with windows me (in inventory) and windows 8 as the bottom tier. probably fair on the consumer side. the engineering work that went into vista is the foundation that every later windows release sits on, which is the version of fairness windows engineers tell themselves when they think about it.

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