Windows has been running an "every other one is good" process for a while. I think it may actually be causal; Microsoft has a "good windows", which lasts for 3-5 years, it gets overconfident internally as everyone just becomes accustomed to dominance and starts thinking it has a platform it can do something other than "be a good operating system" from, so it designs a piece of crap and gets humbled for a couple of years. So they take the time to make a good OS. Then repeat.
Windows 10 was a good windows. Not perfect, but it's been pretty good. I thought maybe we escaped from this cycle when they announced Windows 10 would be the last windows, but I've expected 11 to very likely be a pile of crap since I first heard it announced.
Windows 12 will be the one to look out for.
(They do have a platform they can do something other than "be a good operating system" from... it's just it rests on the foundation of having a good operating system. They seem to neglect their foundation every other major release.)
Is it actually a case of every other version being good, or is it a case of the market settling upon every other version? Nearly every version of Windows had its critics, yet the "bad" versions typically had such a short life those issues couldn't be address or users couldn't be accustomed to the changes, so the bad is what people tended to remember.
Me was just a buggy piece of trash, maybe it would have gotten fixed, but XP was around the corner. Speaking purely from personal experience—had a desktop running Me, it’s the only time I ever saw Explorer crash.
Vista’s actually a decent Windows. The changes to security that broke a bunch of apps and made pop-ups everywhere stuck around, they just got polished a bit in later Windows, it would have been fine if Vista had a longer life.
Windows 8 had the Metro UI and introduced a ton of misguided changes around the assumption that people will be using touch—changes which were often half-implemented at best, so even if you had a touchscreen (I developed for these), you had to constantly switch between the Metro and desktop interfaces. A lot of those changes got unwound in 8.1 and 10.
IMO the bad ones are Me and 8. Anything that fixed 8’s problems would have gotten a new version number.
Early XP was also a horrible experience. If you installed an early version Windows XP and connected to the internet to update, you might get malware from remote vulnerabilities before the updates finished downloading.
Probably a bit of both. The market settles on a version that's "good enough" and it gets patched until it's "good". But Windows 8 was around for quite a while, and never got to be particularly good.
10 became good over time.
8 was crap, and stayed crap with 8.1.
7 became good over time.
Vista was crap.
XP became good over time.
I disagree. I think that makes sense as a hindsight view, but at the time, the good version of Windows generally started good, and the bad versions were generally bad out of the gate too.
By "good" I don't mean perfect. But Windows 95 was good, 98 was good, XP was amazing compared to what there was at the time, 7 was good, and 10 was good. Vista was immediately a bomb from the moment I first saw its desktop that looked like a not even particularly good Linux desktop theme [1]. ME was a buggy mess from start to finish. 8 wasn't as much of a disaster but the whole attempt to merge tablet UI and desktop UI was just fundamentally flawed.
Windows being Windows I'm sure tons of people can pop up with stories about how their first install of XP ate their entire hard drive and also killed their dog, but generally I think it's pretty obvious pretty quickly which way a version of Windows is going to go.
One of the major markers of a bad version of Windows is that it's made for Microsoft's needs and not the users. If another comment in this discussion is accurate and Windows 11 is primarily so they can dump a lot of hardware, dump old booting code for non-UEFI boots, etc., then that suggests to me they don't have a strong through-line on what the value for the user is, which is going to lead to sadness. Even though those goals are good and ultimately even necessary in the long haul, that's not going to be a set of requirements that leads to a good Windows.
[1]: This one floors me to this day. Like, I don't really have a lot of visual taste and I've run some pretty awful Linux desktop themes back in my younger years for a period of time. My current desktop is a tiling WM and so utilitarian it burns to look at for most people. And that Vista desktop... yeowzers! It was like they pulled a random theme off of a desktop theming site and they got babbies first uploaded theme.
I found Vista to be a huge improvement over the Windows XP Playskool look. I couldn't stand seeing those awful colors and huge bubbly look for all those years... Thankfully you could change the theme to classic, but nobody else did. So it was still everywhere.
Let's not forget that for a while it was almost impossible to install Windows XP while connected to the internet. You'd get infected with Code Red. The security was an existential threat to Windows back then.
Windows 10 was a good windows. Not perfect, but it's been pretty good. I thought maybe we escaped from this cycle when they announced Windows 10 would be the last windows, but I've expected 11 to very likely be a pile of crap since I first heard it announced.
Windows 12 will be the one to look out for.
(They do have a platform they can do something other than "be a good operating system" from... it's just it rests on the foundation of having a good operating system. They seem to neglect their foundation every other major release.)