What an excellent article on Microsoft at Vista times. I especially liked the comparison to the iOS, which perfectly nailed almost everything that Vista made wrong (including the different levels of abstraction in the presentation API which Avalon didn't have).

Microsoft badly misjudged the underlying trends in computer hardware, in particular the right turn that occurred in 2003 to the trend of rapid improvements in single-threaded processor speed and matching improvements in other core elements of the PC. Vista was planned for and built for hardware that did not exist. This was bad for desktops, worse for laptops and disastrous for mobile.