>>715>Vista was nothing special as an OS.Not true. Vista was quite revolutionary, pretty much all improvements that 7 had over XP were already in Vista.
Biggest two issues with Vista weren't with the OS itself at all, they were purely contemporary:
1. Vista took significantly longer to get released than previous Windows successors. Because the same OS [XP] stayed for so long, everyone got used to not having to upgrade the whole PC every 2 years, including PC retailers who sold underpowered machines as "Vista ready" because it was more profitable to sell off stock they already had than to offer newer hardware that would actually run the OS smoothly.
2. Not many people seem to remember this, but XP at launch was just as bad, if not worse than Vista, with people very similarly opting to stay with 98SE instead, for pretty much the same reasons as why many people didn't move to Vista from XP (mainly the large performance/requirement difference + incompatibilities with older or uncommon hardware/software). It's just that Vista had the misfortune of being released after broadband Internet access became common and the whole "Web 2.0" thing (social media, user-driven content creation, etc.) had really kicked off, while WinXP had a lot of time to mature as an OS, as well as for people to just get used to XP. So even/especially non-tech savvy people with Internet access and social media just meme'd on Vista being bad. Even if someone wasn't knowledgeable or interested in OSes themselves, they would often just repeat the "Vista bad" opinion they read online.