>Microsoft invested in platform features and then didn't sell users on what it could do with Vista.
I think you are focusing on features that are unimportant to most users. People hated Vista because it was so slow, clunky and crashed. I remain amazed that between clicking a folder an seeing a file within it can take about a minute on my friends old Vista machine. I'm also pleasantly surprised on my MacBook that it pretty much never freezes and resumes from sleep in about 2 secs with going wrong unlike any windows machine. What counts for users is how the machine works, not whether the underlying implementation is trendy, I think.
Did your friend buy a Vista machine with roughly equivalent hardware?
I dropped $1200 on a Vista laptop (Inspiron 1520) back in 2006/2007. It wasn't slow (Kubuntu on the same HW was faster though) and I don't recall it ever crashing. Sleep worked reliably although it was more on the order of 30 seconds with a spinning disk. I very much preferred it to XP at the time mainly for the the start menu improvements. I think a lot of the Vista issues - and to a larger extent, complaints about Windows - come down to subpar hardware. It's my suspicion that if you pay less than $1000 for a laptop it's probably not very good except on paper.
I am still using that laptop today - to write this post in fact. About a year ago I replaced the harddrive with an SSD. I can't speak about Vista performance since I installed 8 (now 8.1 Update 1 or whatever nonsense MS calls the latest Windows), but sleep is extremely fast; the instant I open the lid everything is usable.
I believe that compelling end-user features could be developed on top of the work Microsoft has done on their kernel. A good part of what's missing is somehow selling developers on these platform features. And, of course, Microsoft should lead the way and leverage this tech themselves.
I think you are focusing on features that are unimportant to most users. People hated Vista because it was so slow, clunky and crashed. I remain amazed that between clicking a folder an seeing a file within it can take about a minute on my friends old Vista machine. I'm also pleasantly surprised on my MacBook that it pretty much never freezes and resumes from sleep in about 2 secs with going wrong unlike any windows machine. What counts for users is how the machine works, not whether the underlying implementation is trendy, I think.