Ten years ago, in November 2006, Microsoft set out to dramatically change its personal operating system with the release of Microsoft Vista. Today, that Vista's journey reaches its conclusion with the end of technical support for Vista.

Vista came with nobel intentions, built with the intent of improving safety for users on PCs. "Password systems simply won't cut it," Bill Gates said at the time, noting they were a "weak link" of computer systems. Something Microsoft evidently still believes as it continues to push its password-free "Hello" system.

The company's multi-faceted solution had a public face in what the company called User Account Control, UAC. UAC allowed for multiple users-accounts on the same computer, a feature which did not exist on earlier Microsoft systems. It's goal, which, again, could only be described as well-meaning, was to alert users to what exactly they were downloading onto their computers.

The results were a disaster. UAC proved to be a nuisance, with so many pop-ups and intrusions the New York Times compared it to "having your mother hover over your shoulder while you work." The paper went so far as to instruct users to turn the system off entirely to increase a computer's speed, which the magazine PC World noted "will have absolutely no effect on your PC's speed."

Vista was widely seen as classic Bad Old Days Microsoft: too slow, too intrusive, with a production period beset by drama that reached the front page of the Wall Street Journal. "There was some angst by everybody," Gates said of the period when the product was known by its codename Longhorn. "It's obviously my role to ask people, 'Hey, let's not throw things out we shouldn't throw out. Let's keep things in that we can keep in.'"

The operating system intended to dramatically change how Microsoft looked, with a new style punctuated by Windows Aero. Aero "gave the appearance of highly-rendered glass," a company blog post says, as well as "light sources, reflections, and other graphically complex textures in the title bars, taskbar, and other system surfaces." Some saw the translucent rolodex as beautiful, others felt it was a distraction, everyone admitted it drained battery.

Wracked with negative reviews, Microsoft decided to meet the criticisms head-on with an advertising campaign called "The Mojave Experiment." Those who had heard negative things about Vista were given the operating system under a different name, and it turned out they loved it.

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Vista was the last operating system to be released with company founder Gates in a major role (he was Chief Software Architect at the time, having stepped aside from the CEO position in the year 2000 for Steve Ballmer), after which he went on to found the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Despite its problems, by the time its replacement arrived, Vista had risen to be the second most-widely used operating system in the world, seconded only by its predecessor Windows XP.

The end of technical support for Vista doesn't mean installations will suddenly become useless, just less secure and buggier as time goes on. Millions of people still (inadvisably) used Windows XP after its support end date and both the British and United States military still rely on the software, though the latter pays millions for bespoke security updates. It's hard to imagine anyone doing that to stay on Vista.

Source: The Verge

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