HELLFIRE
It failed to deliver on its original promises. WinFS was never shipped, many of the more radical ideas were cut, and the schedule slipped dramatically. It was also a management failure as it took a near-crisis for Microsoft to course-correct
I partially agree with this but the major issue it had is that most people didn’t have devices with x64 drivers. Those of us running Intel CPUs on Intel motherboards with Intel chipsets and a lot of RAM, we were already happily running on Windows XP x64 and the upgrade to Vista was smooth, it was basically XP with a better interface.
We were super disappointed we didn’t get WinFS but that wasn’t as big a problem as everyone’s crappy-chipset motherboards blue screening because nobody updated their BIOS’ or drivers.