Windows 7 is very good, and almost everything that makes it good is something Microsoft removed.

Fewer permission prompts. Less memory sitting idle. A boot that finishes while you are still looking at the screen. A taskbar that stops pretending every window needs a text label. Aero Snap, which is the only genuinely new interface idea in the release and takes about a day to become invisible. Add it up and the improvement is real, and the shape of the work is subtraction.

Underneath, this is Vista. Same driver model, same kernel lineage, same architecture that caused two years of complaints. Which means the honest way to describe today is that Vista users paid for this. They absorbed the driver breakage while manufacturers caught up, they ran the hardware that was too slow, they sat through the permission dialogs, and the entire ecosystem quietly fixed itself around them. Windows 7 arrives into a world where the compatibility work is finished, and collects the credit.

I do not think that is a scandal. It is roughly how every painful platform transition has gone, and the alternative was never shipping the transition. But the story now settling into place is that Vista was a failure and 7 is a triumph, and that framing gets the causation backwards. Without the failure there is no triumph, because the expensive part was already done.

The other thing worth saying out loud is that Microsoft lost the argument about permission prompts and pretended it was a usability fix. The Vista dialogs were annoying because they were constant, and they were constant because the software everyone ran assumed administrator rights it did not need. Turning the frequency down does not make that go away. It moves it somewhere you cannot see it, and everyone involved is relieved.

What I am curious about is the enterprise side, where a very large number of desktops are still running an eight year old operating system and have skipped a generation entirely. Those organisations now face the upgrade they deferred, and they will do it, and none of the reasons will have anything to do with Aero Snap.

Buy it. Just do not let anyone tell you Microsoft rediscovered how to make software this year. They finished something they started in 2007 and gave it a different number.