Posted 05/27/2009 at 12:04:07pm

When discussing whether or not Vista was a failure, I think it's important to consider not just the home & hobby market, but also the business world.  An overwhelming majority of medium to large businesses refused to upgrade from XP to Vista.  The main problem was application compatibility. 

Sure, Vista ran MS Office and Adobe and even QuickBooks.  But outside of these staples were the home-grown applications businesses used on a day-to-day basis.  When they tried porting them to Vista, the apps wouldn't work.  Businesses had a choice to make:  Should they spend a gargantuan amount of time and money re-coding their apps just so they could spend more time and money deploying Vista?  Or should they stick with XP Pro, which was working just fine?  As Harvey "Mr. White" Keitel once said, "That ain't no choice at all."

In this sense, Vista was a failure.  The fact that a "virtual XP" machine will be included in the Pro, Enterprise and Ultimate versions of Windows 7 for running XP-only apps can be interpreted as Microsoft's acknowledgement of Vista's shortcoming.