Windows 7 won back the users that Vista had driven away
Windows Vista launched to complaints about sluggish performance, hardware that would not work and endless security prompts. Microsoft's answer was not a radical reinvention but a careful refinement. Windows 7 arrived in October 2009, was greeted as a major improvement, and went on to sell more than 630 million copies.
The road there was messy. Microsoft had planned an ambitious successor to XP called Blackcomb, with a new storage system built around searching data. An interim release, Longhorn, swelled with features, then stalled when a wave of worms hit Windows in August 2003 and Microsoft switched effort to security patches. Longhorn was reset in 2004 and shipped as Vista, while Blackcomb, renamed Vienna, was cancelled in 2007.
Windows 7 took a humbler path. About 1,000 developers, split into 25 teams of around 40, focused on speed and compatibility, using tracing tools to hunt inefficient code. Its internal version number was 6.1, one step up from Vista, which helped older programs that only checked the first number. A beta leaked online in December 2008, and early benchmarks showed it booting and shutting down faster than both XP and Vista.
Users noticed the taskbar first. Programs could now be pinned to it, with Jump Lists for recent files, and a thin button at the far right revealed the desktop. Aero Snap let a window fill half the screen when dragged to one edge, and shaking a window's title bar cleared away everything else. Security prompts were toned down too.
Pre-orders broke Amazon records, and Windows 10 did not overtake it as the most popular Windows until January 2018. Extended support ended on 14 January 2020, though businesses could pay for up to three more years of security updates.
Source: Windows 7
