[Felix Torres]

But... Vista is no more a technology than is the Lisa.
Its a product built out of a collection technologies; Aero, WFC, WinFX, DX10, etc. Neither product belongs on a list of technologies.

Think of HDTVs; they are products built off a series of technologies; LCD displays, HDMI data transfer protocols, ATSC content broadcasting, QAM cable encoding...
You can say a specific HDTV model is a disappointment without indicting the various technologies that go into it; conversely, a successful product might include disappointing technologies along with successful ones.

As to Vista the product being a failute; doesn't that require a context? A failure at what? Blunting unfair TV commercials? Probably. Upgrading three year-old PCs? Maybe. At a minimum we would need to agree on what Vista was supposed to be and what it failed at. To say Vista failed to be a suitable replacement OS for XP hardware is hardly a damning statement you know; all Microsoft OSes are designed as OEM products first and upgrade paths second. And properly so.

At most, Vista PCs failed to ship with abundant, stable device drivers. And Vista PCs failed to ship to consumer without loads of performance-sapping crapware. And that is more an indictment of the PC vendors than Vista itself.

When installed on contemporary hardware in a clean state, Vista is both stable and fast. Hardly the disaster of biblical proportions that the TV ads pretend.

There are millions of us out here actually doing productive work on Vista machines with nary a gripe, you know.