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Comment by okeumeni | Hacker News Reader

Why Windows 8 we have barely used 7?

   1985:      Windows 1.0
   1987:      Windows 2.0
   1990:      Windows 3.0
  (1992:      Windows 3.1)
   1995:      Windows 95
   1998:      Windows 98
  (2000:      Windows ME)
   2001:      Windows XP
   2006/2007: Windows Vista
   2009:      Windows 7
   2012:      Windows 8

Nothing out of the ordinary.

Windows usually has a three year cicle. Vista stopped this mostly because of the development hell that it was.

My favorite part is where they threw it all out, reset to 2003 codebase, and started from scratch basically, 18ish months before release.[1]

So from a technical standpoint, Vista took longer [5 years] and had less development time [under 2 years] actually make it into the product. (Yes, code they already had they could and did reincorporate into the final product, but still, wow.)

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2005/10/16/481625.as...

This post is full of snark by the way, but it is useful to know what went wrong with Vista. (TL;DR: Management of very large software development is _hard_)

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