Vista broke with DOS and 16bit code. It elevated security. It required better hardware. It moved x64 toward the mainstream. The architecture of the OS was brought forward a decade.

Tick.

Windows 7 was a refinement of Vista.

Tock.

Windows 8 was a new interface and a step toward multi platform, e.g. ARM.

Tick.

Windows 10 is a full on multiplatform assault.

Tock.

Running a big company is nontrivial. Microsoft's management has never been incompetent. The company has always been very profitable.

> Vista broke with DOS and 16bit code.

This is completely wrong in a couple of ways.

Vista popularized 64-bit Windows, and 16-bit WoW (responsible for running 16 bit Windows programs) never made it to 64-bit Windows. This was true for the earlier Windows XP 64-bit, and it has been true for every 64-bit Windows that followed. So there's always been some confusion on this point, but note: 16-bit WoW exists even today on 32-bit versions of Windows 8. Today you have to enable it explicitly, but it is available.

Also, the NT-based versions of Windows never included DOS. They were never "with" DOS such that they'd need to "break with" DOS. The last Windows that included a version of DOS was Windows ME. The last Windows that included a version of DOS which anyone ever willingly used was Windows 98.

> Windows 10 is a full on multiplatform assault.

It's a pretty modest number of platforms compared to all those supported by NT in the late nineties. Although it will probably end up running on a lot more devices...

Thanks.

Pretty sure that "breaking with DOS" has already been the case since NT.

Depends of the definition of breaking with DOS.

What you say is "Tick tock" was actually "flop, recover".

The VP of Vista fled to Amazon before it was publicly released.

Vista had some big changes in it, but shipped with lots of issues and had horrible driver support at the beginning. A while back I set up a laptop for aged relative with Vista plus all the service packs and fixes, and it was really fast and smooth. Very surprising.

When Vista shipped, the problem with drivers was that many manufacturers chose not to update drivers for most legacy hardware to the new, more secure driver model. The other standard complaint was with its security popups. Part of that was rough edges on the user experience design, part was just that people weren't used to thinking about security on their machines...that's changed over the past few years. And of course a lot of the complaints were because Vista was a change.

Also it's not that system was throwing UAC prompts on users, applications did. Ever since XP there were rules around what files go where, how installers should behave, etc. but people chose to ignore them (because they could). When Vista started enforcing certain things, elevation dialogs happened. What made MS in the days past (app ecosystem) broke it when quality started to matter.