- [Narrator] In 2007,
Microsoft officially released a brand new version of the Windows operating system; Vista. 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." But for many people, Vista brought anything, but clarity. Take a look at this review
from columnist, Gary Krakow, of NBC news, from may of 2006, just six months before the operating system's
release to manufacturing: "I would like to tell you
how easy it was to install "and how much fun I've
had using Vista Beta 2 "over the past few days, "but I can't. "That's because the combination of Beta 2 "and the laptop computers
I tried to install it on "was like trying to mix oil and water. "Installing Vista Beta 2 was one "of the worst operating system experiences "that I've ever encountered." You might be thinking to yourself, "Well, that's not really
a fair assessment. "Any piece of software
that's still in Beta is going "to run into tons of problems "and is not going to be perfect." And you would be right to an extent. You see, even after Vista
was released worldwide, this thought process did not really change for a lot of people. Many consumers complained about
the OS's weak performance, with one user bold enough to claim that Vista was clearly the
worst piece of software even Microsoft had ever released. A man was even arrested for shooting his girlfriend's computer because it had Windows
Vista installed on it. In addition, Apple had a field day with all of this; taking every chance
they had to attack Vista in their famous "Mac
versus PC" commercials. - Forget that Vista
still doesn't work right. Forget that it's caused so many problems. Forget that you could
have switched to Mac, but instead, you stuck with PC, and now your yoga studio billing
is completely screwed up. (metal clunking) - Maybe I should try pilates. (music fades) - [Narrator] What exactly happened? Why did this seemingly, revolutionary-looking operating system, receive such intense backlash? What possibly could have gone
wrong with Windows Vista? Why did it fail? 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 wanna get
into the nitty-gritty details of what exactly caused Vista to fail, we need to go all the way 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 a 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, Black comb 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 originally
anticipated release date was in 2003, with Blackcomb coming out later in 2005. But over time 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 Directions
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 just being 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, designed to use both hardware and software to protect the end user
from malicious activity, a brand 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 known
as Windows Future Storage. Longhorn became quite
an ambitious project. And many of these features which were initially
reserved for Blackcomb, were now essentially being
crammed into one Longhorn. So its release date was
extended even further to 2005. With how development was going
with this entire project, it was apparent that
Microsoft didn't really have a good sense of direction and weren't exactly sure of what they wanted Longhorn to be. The OS became more bloated and
unstable as time progressed. And some major changes such
as even completely rewriting some parts of the operating system, made it incredibly difficult to use. One of these features was the inclusion of the .NET Framework, also known as WinFX. This made application deployment easier, especially in enterprise environments, by eliminating the
requirement of downloading and installing the .NET Framework. Additionally, a significant
portion of the operating system was actually written and managed C-sharp, using the now included .NET Framework. While this framework increased security and cross-platform compatibility for the operating system, it also increased the amount of code and dependencies required for some of the default applications. In English, Microsoft
thought of a really good idea and went about creating
it in a very messy way. Microsoft accepted that they were running into way too many problems. And by August, 2004, the Longhorn project was completely reset and the release date was now uncertain. That's four years of Windows XP. Over time, Microsoft would
include only a handful of the features that
it originally intended for the project. Ultimately, dropping features
like Palladium and WinFS, but still including new
graphics and a Start search. In April, 2005, one of
the few Longhorn builds officially released by Microsoft, introduced the Aero theme and had a very close
resemblance to Windows XP. To Microsoft surprise,
this was not well-received. Windows enthusiast, Paul Thurrott, had some things to say about it; calling this build, painful and the makings of a train wreck. Luckily, as time progressed, so did Longhorn. Many changes were made to the system, including even the project's name which was now, of course, Vista. Although future Beta releases of the OS did have its problems, it wasn't even comparable
to Longhorn pre-reset. At least Microsoft now had a vision and was quite confident
with its new release date to manufacturers, in November of 2006. Each Beta release gave them
more opportunities to patch bugs and make everything
look more professional. In a lot of respects, things were actually looking quite nice. And Microsoft was finally able to get Vista released on time. (Windows startup tune) But still it sucked. Despite all the major changes that Microsoft made to Vista by the time of its release, people still hated it and the OS quickly developed
a negative reputation. Although the issues Vista had
were on order of magnitude, less severe than they were with Longhorn, when looking at how everything unfolded during its development, it's easy to see where things went wrong. People waited a very long time
to get an operating system that was completely bloated
due to the rewriting of code, and over the top security feature known as User Account Control, and a GUI that seemed to only
work properly on the latest and greatest hardware. Otherwise, the OS was incredibly slow. Because Microsoft didn't
really have an objective throughout most of Longhorn's development, they didn't really have the chance to execute Vista's features properly. As a result, some unsatisfied customers even went back to XP, and this trend made Vista's
reputation even worse than it should have been. Windows XP was just too popular. And at the time, it would have been hard to top it. In 2008, over 70% of
all computers worldwide were running Windows XP. Many businesses running XP, at the time, were also running critical applications that in some respects,
only worked with XP. On top of everything else, Vista was also facing huge
backwards compatibility issues. So in addition to hearing all the negative feedback
it was receiving, many businesses either didn't
have the money to upgrade, or if they did, were just
fine sticking with XP and didn't wanna risk corrupting
their critical software. XP is already doing
what it is supposed to. And because it is so popular, support for it isn't
going to end anytime soon. So why spend money on an
apparently pointless upgrade? If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Matters got worse when it came to the marketing side of things. It wasn't that Microsoft
advertising for Vista was bad, it's that the advertising against Vista was so much better. And it can be argued that the way Longhorns
development was handled had a lot to do with this. The new storage system we
mentioned earlier, WinFS, was hyped as one of Longhorns
most innovative features. In short, it would form relationships between different types of data to make managing that
data, easier for the user. But one feature that WinFS also boasted was its new metadata search. You didn't have to just search for a name of a file on your computer. If you forgot the name of a text file, but remember, say, a particular word that was used in it, it would show up. Pretty neat. It was a huge improvement
over XP search system which we're not even gonna talk about. But because of development issues and many other complicated reasons, WinFS was pulled. But most of its search
capabilities stayed. Most people didn't really care. But the way it was
handled was problematic. Before WinFS was discontinued, Microsoft had announced in October, 2003, that this new search
feature would be standard in the next Windows. Yeah, they really should have
just kept their mouth shut because a lot of companies were betting that Microsoft was not going to release the next Windows on time, and we're now creating
their own search tools for Windows XP or other systems so they could compete in the market. One specific person was
Apple CEO, Steve Jobs. He saw the potential of this new concept and wanted to bring
something similar to the Mac. Apple would achieve a
pretty big milestone in 2005 with its release of OS X Tiger. The macOS which would first introduce Spotlight search, a metadata search tool. OS X now had this cool search bar that Microsoft had been hyping up. Only for the development of Windows to continue being postponed. Such a feature became less
exciting and more expected. As we discussed, WinFS
wasn't just a search feature, it was much more than that. But most people didn't know that. With the removal of WinFS, a lot of people actually
thought these search features would not be on Vista at all, when that actually wasn't true. So to them, it was now
just one more feature that Windows didn't have. Apple's release of Tiger made their "Get a Mac" campaign, pretty easy. And when Vista wasn't receiving
the feedback it wanted, they had even more reason to brag. A lot of people who were impartial to the Windows Vista situation were now being evangelized
into buying a Mac instead. Vista dug its own grave, but others helped. And of course, the reason
why Vista was hated so much is because it was popular to hate Vista. I mean, all the cool kids were doing it. First impressions are everything. And when things start out with such a significantly negative result, it's kind of hard to gain redemption. Many people who dealt with
the worst parts of Vista were not open-minded to any improvement. And even people who had
never even tried the OS thought all the horror stories were enough and didn't want anything to do with it. They just didn't wanna see Vista succeed, and Microsoft understood this. They knew there was no
going back with the project and decided to do something,
a little bit different. In 2008, Microsoft revealed
to a small focus group that they were currently working
on a new operating system. It was code named Mojave and basically served as
an apology for Vista. They first asked everybody
to rate windows Vista on a scale of one to 10. It got a zero. Afterwards, they were given a taste of the new Windows Mojave. And they liked it a lot. It was given a 10. But that wasn't all. (music fades) - Are you serious? (woman chuckles) - This is Windows Vista. - I'm getting it.
(woman laughs) - [Narrator] Yes, it
was a social experiment conducted by Microsoft to show that Vista still had a
fighting chance to be good. Great, even. And that, with all these new changes, the negative perception was
just that, negative perception. In a lot of ways, Vista
just came out too early. It did objectively have problems that weren't present on Windows XP. But a lot of the more glaring ones were just problems of the time. The reason Windows Vista
crashed so much was often because the computer's GPU used drivers that simply didn't fully support it yet. It was slow because users were
installing it on computers with hardware that just
wasn't ideal for it. One gigabyte of RAM was
pretty advanced at the time. It used up so much memory because, well, it actually didn't. Vista simply took the unused memory to run other background processes to make the OS perform better. It was only the illusion
that it took up memory. Was Vista as bad as we remember it? With everything we've just talked about, the answer is both yes and no. Windows Vista did
eventually get the treatment that it deserved, as hardware got better. With some changes, of course, Vista was rebranded to Windows 7 in 2009. Conveniently, the same year
the "Get a Mac" campaign ended, but, I digress. Microsoft finally got the
response that it wanted, with Windows 7 being considered by many as the greatest operating
system of all time. And that is definitely
something to be proud of. With that being said, thank you for your
sacrifice, Windows Vista. Do you have any positive or negative experiences with Vista? Tell me your stories
in the comments below. Thank you so much for watching. If you enjoyed this video, please subscribe and click
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