Vista - If Windows 7 fails who will be responsible for it?

There’s no doubting that financially, and that’s the only thing that matters really, Windows Vista was a disaster. Microsoft shareholders must not have been happy. But let’s examine exactly who, at least what groups, were responsible for this failure and ask the question if history can or will repeat.
Windows is a shell, a large one admittedly, but a shell into which third-party companies plug their code. I’d like to take each of these parties and reflect on what they did right and wrong.
Microsoft

Okay so clearly Microsoft had to shoulder a lot of the blame for Vista. They were simply too ambitious with it and when they had to, effectively, dump all the code and start again from scratch half way through the development process everyone knew there was trouble ahead.
Vista was late, nearly two years late and that equates to a big financial penalty. Companies and major corporations pay millions every year to Microsoft in volume licencing and subscription fees. For this they expect a regular development cycle, about every three years. Simply put they didn’t get it. Thus the pressure was on Microsoft to deliver and clearly they panicked and rushed Vista out the door without proper testing.
Hang on a minute! I hear you cry, the beta programme for Windows Vista lasted a year and a half and took in about half a million testers!! You compare that to the beta for Windows 7 that only took six months and had only 5,000 testers.
Windows Vista was an experiment, a version 1.0 product. It was essentially a brand new operating system as Microsoft were trying out new systems. But there was an awful lot of legacy code built into that and the resulting mish-mash made Vista the dog that it was.

...Now I hear similar rumbles about Win7, but how long do people want to stay on XP?

Right? People forget that Windows XP wasn't a runaway success at first either, and it seems to me that the majority of people who fell in love with XP from day one were coming from Windows ME (garbage)

Hmm, I am not sure whether I agree. I bought a system with Vista on day1 (Febr. 1, 07) and then 3 more. I had few problems except in the beginning. And those were mostely with OEM programs like drivers, the router, etc. But since I had no prior PC history, I bought my systems a little bigger than the "migrants". Thus the admittedly generous resource usage (RAM and disk space) did not really affect me. But I agree with the observation that there is too much legacy code in the system. They should have streamlined it a lot more, even at the expense of loosing some backlevel compatibility.
The other problem, of course, was that the people did not want to learn something new and a lot of people were badmouthing Vista without ever having tried it for one minute (see the Mojave experiment). Now I hear similar rumbles about Win7, but how long do people want to stay on XP?

Agreed JMH good point Jim