They rolled back the fail. Vista was a glitchy monstrosity similar in problems to Windows ME, 7 is remarkably stable. Or have you forgotten the endless problems people were having, attempts at refunds, and battling with PC makers to continue offering XP instead of only Vista (eventually succeeding, for the most part)? Why do you think Microsoft has continued to support XP for so long?
Yes, 7 builds off Vista. But that's because Vista was a half-complete version of 7. If they used Vista to test the waters and experiment, then yes, it quite likely helped 7, but it also screwed their image something awful, aiding in the slow adoption of 7. As a huge amount of people have demonstrated, stability and consistency are more important than shininess.
If they had run the 7 pre-release public betas earlier, they probably could have done away with Vista entirely, and been better off in the end. People are more accepting of problems in betas, especially when they're free. Instead, they essentially got ripped off for hundreds of dollars with Vista, only to be nailed with more costs to upgrade to something usable when 7 came out.
A lot of the glitchiness was due to buggy third-party drivers. It was "fixed in 7" not as a result of any changes in 7, but as a result of third parties fixing their drivers. FWIW, I ran Vista for a year both and home and at work with very few problems. (if anything, 7 was less stable for me for a while due to some NVIDIA chipset drivers, this was eventually fixed with a driver update).
By the way, I'm definitely not saying that Microsoft didn't botch its Vista release, or that all the blame for the problems people had falls on third parties. Microsoft failed to communicate effectively with its partners, kept pulling the rug underneath them with breaking changes during the betas, etc. But saying it should have never existed, but 7 should, doesn't make much sense. If they'd held off for another two years or something and just released 7, 7 would probably have had just as much of a reputation for glitchiness as Vista did.
Agreed. If you use Vista fully-patched these days, it's perfectly acceptable. The only things you find wrong are the new UI features from Windows 7 (most noticeable the taskbar improvements).
Yes, 7 builds off Vista. But that's because Vista was a half-complete version of 7. If they used Vista to test the waters and experiment, then yes, it quite likely helped 7, but it also screwed their image something awful, aiding in the slow adoption of 7. As a huge amount of people have demonstrated, stability and consistency are more important than shininess.
If they had run the 7 pre-release public betas earlier, they probably could have done away with Vista entirely, and been better off in the end. People are more accepting of problems in betas, especially when they're free. Instead, they essentially got ripped off for hundreds of dollars with Vista, only to be nailed with more costs to upgrade to something usable when 7 came out.