[citation][nom]D_Kuhn[/nom].....I'm also pretty shocked that for all the bad press Vista has gotten (some deserved, some undeserved), it's only cost Microsoft a couple percentage points in the market. I imagine that Windows will gain most of that back with Windows 7 - which I believe is almost as strong a product as Microsoft marketing is claiming it is.[/citation]
A lot undeserved I think. I was using vista for quite some time, after SP1 it was perfectly ok as an OS, after SP2 I'd say it was a good os, certainly better than xp so long as you had moderately up to date hardware (like not over 6 years old). Apart from just a couple of major cock-ups (*cough* transfer speeds *cough*) the majority of complaints came about because of either bad support from third party software and hardware (partly MS's fault, but given how long it was in development, other manufacturers had plenty of time to get involved and sort their shit out), or because people just wouldn't accept that they couldnt keep running their out of date hardware.
As one review said, Vista was necessery, it was never going to be popular because it required a lot of change, necessery change, to improve both security, reliability and the low level graphics system. Windows 7 owes a huge part of its success to vista, and I am still amused when people slam vista but say 7 is great.
That said, I think MS knew they would take a hit over vista.