A good 22-minute video from XDA about the debacle that was Windows Vista and the corrective measure that followed, Windows 7:

It taught me many things and it clarified that things were more complicated than they seemed. Windows Vista (widely seen as failure) perhaps wasn’t so bad, and 7 (quoted by many as the best Windows ever) was not that far away from Vista, down to its internal version number being 6.1 to Vista’s 6.0.

It’s also interesting to reflect on this today, when macOS is having its own Vista moment.

There is also a follow-up video on Windows 8, the possibly most consequential Windows release of that era, with product decisions that reverberate still today.

Main takeaway: An entire book could be written and a lifetime of lessons learned from Microsoft’s “.1” releases.