I think Sinofsky was still in Office when this was happening. He comes into the picture with Windows 8 since Microsoft wanted Windows to be as successful as Off

I think Sinofsky was still in Office when this was happening. He comes into the picture with Windows 8 since Microsoft wanted Windows to be as successful as Office had become. Jim Allchin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Allchin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Allchin) was in charge at the time of Vista. Office had stuck with regular the regular Windows platform and were focusing on UI and getting into a regular release rhythm under Sinofsky. People forget but Office releases used to be a real crapshoot and Microsoft needed to move to a true subscription model at some point (the original activation wasn't it.) To do this you need regular updates at least a few years apart before you can even get close to what's needed for a subscription business. Sinofsky seems to have been a real success here, but not so much in Windows. Looking back the expectations for Vista could never meet the reality. Windows was fundamentally not ready as a product or team to deliver on any of the promises. This was not much different from Cairo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(operating_system)) as it turned out. If the focus had been on the fundamentals like regular releases they may have been achieved some of what is promised with the right compromises. I also wouldn't discount some of the hardware changes in the period. We were getting multi-core and there was a transition to 64-bit.