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Comment by brokencode | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft likes to alternate between good and bad releases of Windows.

XP was good, Vista was bad. 7 was good, 8 was bad. 10 was good, and 11 is kind of bad. Not as bad as Vista or 8, but still noticeably worse than 10.

Here’s hoping that 12 will be an OS with upgrading to.

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They broke that streak at the turn of the century. 95 was bad, 98 was good, 2000 was good, XP was good, and then Vista was bad.

Apparently ME was so bad it's been memory-holed.

We don’t talk about Window Me

Extremely hot take: Vista was not actually that bad. It was just too many new things at once and required such a massive hardware upgrade.

Windows 7 was not that fundamentally different, but by the time it came out the bandaid had been ripped off.

Vista had two major problems: Microsoft understated its minimum requirements and allowed it to be shipped preinstalled on machines that were far short of what it actually required, and UAC was specifically designed to make poorly behaved software unpleasant to use, which was a major problem when every Windows program was poorly behaved.

The first could have been easily avoided, but I genuinely don't know how MS could have avoided burning a version on UAC. Maybe if they had shipped it in a service pack first so that XP SP4 was the thing that got a miserable reputation? That clearly wasn't a reasonable option after the Longhorn disaster, though.

There were also a lot of small problems that got fixed on the way to Windows 7. 7 did feel a lot like Vista SP2 with some visual tweaks, but it would have been a really impressive SP.

Oh man, I totally forgot about the UAC! That's a great callout.

Actually, I used Vista myself for around a year, and for me subjectively it was okay. I later upgraded that installation to 7 and used it several more years on the same hardware.

Pretty much what I have been saying.

Windows 7 was in many aspects Vista SE, they just had to give it a new name because Vista was so „tainted“.

I mean it even reported as Windows NT 6.1 (Vista was 6.0)

This works when you pick and choose. You ignored Win2K which is the best Windows version ever and Windows 8.1 which was good too.

Windows Me came out after Windows 2000 so it still works!

(but then the timeline breaks at Windows 98SE again... the DOS/9x->NT transition will always be a rift since there were OSes that coexisted)

This whole flip-flop is as vacant as Moore’s law. It gets flexed to fit the narrative of the day.

No, it’s just a general theme of Windows releases for the past 20 years. They make big, sweeping changes in one release that people don’t like, then spend multiple years addressing criticism until they come up with something that people like again.

Quibble as you may about exact version numbers, but the pattern is not really deniable.

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