In a sense, they did keep polishing. It's just that they had another, much larger team adding shiny features that became roadblocks to existing users. I used t

In a sense, they did keep polishing. It's just that they had another, much larger team adding shiny features that became roadblocks to existing users. I used to run Win7 in a form that looked very much like XP. The newer OS had many small improvements and refinements, not just the 'in-your-face' big ticket items. Windows 8 actually sounds the same - Microsoft published some interesting articles during development about lots of kernel-level changes, systems tweaks and so on (e.g. look at the windows process manager) The problem has always been the massive forced-down-your-throat changes that MS insist upon, and Windows 8 took that even further.