3 ms·

XP to Vista took 6 years because MS had huge plans for Longhorn. It took some time to build these things, then some more time to decide they won't be ready any

• krylon 12y ago
  In all fairness, they did not throw all of their plans away - some of the more visible ones, like WinFS, yes, but from what I know, they reworked a lot of Windows' internals going from XP to Vista/7, like the audio and the network stack. They also made important changes regarding security that at least made it more difficult to exploit bugs in more recent versions of Windows. And, having personally almost no experience with Vista, the changes they made to the GUI between XP and Windows 7 are, IMHO, rather nice in terms of actual usability. Also, Vista development got stalled big time when Microsoft first pulled out a substantial part of the Longhorn team to work on XP Service Pack 2, and then decided to re-base Longhorn from XP to Windows Server 2003 (R2?). The net result was, of course, still a system that took much longer than planned and ended up being a huge disappointment to pretty much everybody, even by Microsoft's standards. But if you consider Vista a "public beta" of Windows 7 and compare XP to Windows 7 side by side, I think - as far as Windows systems go - Windows 7 was actually a big improvement. (Not only on its predecessors, but also on its successors, as they saying goes.)