It's common knowledge by now even amongst the general public that Vista exploded on the launch pad. At this point, the only thing this line of inquiry has to offer is to help Microsoft prevent a repeat of the last performance. If you ask me, Windows 7 will suffer many of the same problems -- namely because they are still using the monkey-horde development technique, which is get a bunch of third-world programmers in a room and churn out very lackluster code, and then keep redeveloping it until it works "good enough". Microsoft still hasn't learned that great programmers have a lot of experience outside programming, and to make the best code you need to give them the freedom to try different solutions and then listen to their feedback. From what I've seen, Microsoft is a hugely divided organization where hundreds of small teams compete to produce the most lines of code and nobody knows quite what everybody else is doing. Management constantly changes direction during the development process, to the point that a lot of work is wasted in duplication of effort and things being thrown away due to changing priorities.

Windows has reached a level of complexity that these kinds of organizational mistakes can no longer be tolerated, but Microsoft is too large and entrenched to be capable of streamlining their development process. Maybe they get rid of UAC, and the DRM, and rewrite the driver infrastructure so it sucks less; And those are all fine goals to have, but it doesn't fix the real problem -- which is that the organization made these decisions in the first place when I know their developers were screaming at them "For the love of all things good and holy in the world don't do it!"

Microsoft isn't the first to deal with this. One Mr. Richard Feynman noted similar organizational problems that led to the Challenger disaster at NASA. NASA has been trying to squelch this addendum for some time and you won't find a link to it on their main report anymore, but you can find it here http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/rogers-commission/Appendix-F.txt