If what you've described was indeed the case Vista would have taken off eventually, but it didn't and it barely touch a 20% of the market in almost 3 years of b

If what you've described was indeed the case Vista would have taken off eventually, but it didn't and it barely touch a 20% of the market in almost 3 years of being exclusively sold by OEM on new machines. In the Enterprise market, it probably never reached a 1% of all installs. The reason for this phenomenon is in my experience that most computers are actually managed by a vast public of "techies", i.e. people that are computer literate enough to reinstall an OS and to provide support to their computer illiterate relatives and friends. These people tend to be vastly over assess their IT knowledge, and are very vulnerable to "rumors" spread on forums and blogs. This makes them very prone to becoming zealot about random topics they hear on the internet (like "Windows 8 sucks", or "Linux is bad"). When a non-techie gets a new computer with a new Windows version, they often can't figure out how to accomplish even the most basic things - or rather, they don't care and don't want to invest the time to tinker with the new system, generally. They then rely on their own "trusted" person for that, and one frequent answer they get is that the new Windows version is crap and they offer to downgrade their computer. I've seen this happen a lot with both Vista and 8, EVERYONE was downgrading PCs back then without a good reason for doing so. I even saw PC shops recommending to downgrade before selling a computer, with leaflets advertising for the service on the front desk. I saw a high school buy Core 2 Quad machines in 2008 and wipe away Vista in favour of XP, even though they only needed the machines for Office and Autocad, and there was thus absolutely no reason whatsoever for doing so, given how beefy the machines were back then and that Vista SP1 had basically fixed the OS. The main motivation behind this was the stigma around Vista, and the fact the IT department was full of low-skilled technicians that got their training from pinned threads in PC forums. It was rare to find anyone using Vista back then, even on new computers, unless they were basically grandparents whose grandchildren lived far away. For what I've learned in these years, the first month or so a new Windows version comes out is crucial and it foreshadows how well it's going to fare with users. If there's even a slight hint of doubt it could be bad the users immediately reject it, it gets stigmatized and it is basically dead in the water.