Vista was a sad and costly failure from day one. It was a mistake and Microsoft is wiser now. Vista might have fared a little better had Microsoft not had to negotiate its way through a recession, but that’s incidental. It wasn’t the cause of Vista’s failure.

The main reason Vista came crashing to the ground was that Microsoft believed it could just continue to repeat its modus operandum, which ran something like this:

1. The chip market delivers faster chips.
2. Manufacturers produce bigger and faster PCs.
3. Microsoft produces a new OS to chew up as much of the newly bestowed resources as possible.
4. Older PCs now seem obsolescent.
5. Users get excited about the new PC, which is just like the old PC only the look and feel has moved one inch south and half an inch to the left.
6. A flash flood of new revenue pours into Redmond and the sound of champagne corks popping is heard all over Seattle.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the Vista: this business model collapsed. Several disruptive factors, some that were completely out of Microsoft’s control, blew it apart. Here’s what happened:

1. The Longhorn/Vista project grew late, then very late, then exceedingly late then abysmally late.
2. Microsoft acquired a very powerful competitor in Apple. Apple took the intelligent step of moving to Intel chips – a move that was not made in order to have a more powerful processor (in reality, the processor was less powerful), but in order to make the Mac directly comparable and therefore competitive with the PC.
3. With OS X, the Apple OS was not only better than Windows, but it had three new releases in the time the world was waiting for Vista. The OS X development team must have worn a permanent smile for years. The killer capabilities of OS X (from the user’s perspective): no blue screens, no viruses, a GUI that worked really well.
4. Economy of resource utilization became an issue. People had begun to get tired of long boot up times and then suddenly the small footprint laptop – or Netbook as it is called – appeared. Vista could not even run on a Netbook.
5. The Netbook gave Linux a toehold in the PC market, which Microsoft did its best to stamp on. But it was too late – another if less powerful competitor was now gathering at the gates of Redmond.
6. Corporate PC buyers began to get sick of the cost of PCs when they no longer deliver significant new benefits to the business. Suddenly business benefit in the corporate world was all about mobile devices – a space in which Microsoft did not play well. they didn’t want or care about Vista.

Vista flopped because it was bloated and compared poorly – not just to OS X and Ubuntu – but also to Windows XP. Many companies stayed with XP and cut their PC costs accordingly.

The Prospects for Windows 7

The prospects for Windows 7 are very good. I doubt if the level of uptake is going to be dramatic, but it will be dramatically better than the uptake of Vista. Microsoft will be able to declare a success of a kind. Windows 7 is the first Windows that is not deliberate bloatware. It may not have the economy of OS X (especially the Snow Leopard) or the extreme economy of Linux, and it is still trailing in usability. But it is streets better than Vista and many businesses will make the upgrade as a means of skipping past the Vista wreckage.

Nevertheless, Microsoft faces a huge challenge with Windows 7 and the outcome will not be clear for quite a while. Microsoft once had a monopoly and that’s gone. As time passes there is going to be competition from Google’s Android as well as OS X and desktop Linux. For Microsoft winning will not mean gaining market share, it will mean not losing so much market share that it appears mortally wounded.

The enemy is at the gates and Microsoft has everything to lose.

Yes, pretty much everything.

If Windows falls, a great deal more comes tumbling down with it.