Why Windows Vista Sucked | What Went Wrong

After all, it included many overhauls to the Windows experience, and its entire structuring surrounded a concept that would also become a part of Microsoft’s marketing slogan: “bringing clarity to your world.” However, Mircosoft's marketing and how they approached Vista's development would show that this just wasn't enough.

I think one of the most fascinating things about the phenomenon surrounding Vista’s downfall is that there really isn’t one straightforward answer. It’s a fairly complex situation that really needs to be delved into to be fully understood, a situation that frankly poses another interesting question: Was Vista really as bad as we remember? A superficial answer would tell you that Vista’s failure was simply caused by development issues, the popularity of Windows XP, unfavorable marketing, mob mentality, and, in some respects, simply coming out at the wrong time. 

But if we really want to get into the nitty gritty details of what exactly caused Vista to fail, we need to go all the back to 2001. Yes, Vista already began its decline before even the release of Windows XP. Though it wasn’t called Vista at the time. Microsoft’s new project was under a completely different name: Windows Longhorn.

Code names were often given to Windows versions during their stages of development, Windows XP was Whistler, Vista was Longhorn, and Blackcomb was an even higher, at the time, unknown version of Windows: Windows 7.

Whistler and Blackcomb were names of mountains in British Columbia with Longhorn being a bar between the two places, and specifically Blackcomb was meant to be Microsoft’s next big release of Windows, and just as revolutionary as Windows XP. This Longhorn project was meant to essentially be the vehicle between these two operating systems, but it soon started to become more than that.

You see, Longhorn’s original release date was in 2003, with Blackcomb in 2005. But overtime during its development, Microsoft began piling on more and more features to Longhorn, which would ultimately harm productivity. Many leaks of the OS, both real and fake, began to surface on the web in mid-2002, giving out more information about its features than Microsoft wanted the public to know. But at the beginning, Longhorn didn’t seem much different from XP, and because of this, people still didn’t really know what to expect, despite what they were being told.

An article titled “A Fork in the Road to Longhorn?” was posted to the Direction on Microsoft website in October of 2002, expressing a lot of skepticism about the OS meeting its initial deadline, and they were ultimately right. By 2004, Longhorn was still in development. Rather than being just a transitional release of Windows like it was originally intended, Microsoft soon had a lot more features in mind that they wanted to add to Longhorn. This included a new security architecture called “Palladium,” (or NGSCB) which used hardware and software to protect the OS from malicious activity, a new 3D GUI, faster desktop search, the sidebar (a primitive version of what we recognize today as the “notification center” in Windows 10) and a new storage system called Windows Future Storage (WinFS).

Longhorn became an ambitious project, and many features meant for Blackcomb were now being crammed into Longhorn. It was clear Microsoft didn’t have a good sense of direction and weren’t exactly sure what they wanted Longhorn to be. The OS became more bloated and unstable overtime, and big changes such as completely rewriting some parts of the OS, made it very difficult to use. Microsoft accepted that there was too many problems, and by August 2004, the Longhorn project was completely reset, and the release date was now uncertain...

Microsoft then made many changes to the project, including even the project's name, which was now, of course, "Vista." Each beta release gave them more chances to make it better, and in a lot of ways, things were actually looking quite nice, and Microsoft was finally able to get Vista released on time.

But still...it sucked.