Right back to the days of MS-DOS, every other OS version from Redmond seemed to garner contempt, only for the complainers to be mollified by the version that came after (and claim credit a la 'finally Microsoft has listened to what people like me have been saying since the release of FU-DOS 4.0...'). Vista hasn't been a failure for MS, just not an obvious success. 'Failure' brings to mind things like OS/2.<p>For >20 years now, I've just been in the habit of preferring the odd-numbered versions, and assuming that the even-numbered versions were meant as incubators for the next major shift (most recently, from 32 to 64 bit computing). At first I thought this was due to ham-handedness at MS, but nowadays I wonder if it isn't the actual strategy - the pattern has repeated so many times now, perhaps it's because it actually works for MS. Notice how aggressive advertising on Vista's behalf only began last year as W7 was going into beta.<p>Thus, I predict that Windows 8 will require a minimum of 2 cores, 16gb of RAM and a 1gb Graphics card, leverage virtualization technology for application switching and be decried as a hugely inefficient and pointless attempt to recycle server solutions onto the desktop for no good reason. When Windows 9 emerges, there will be many headlines of the 'Microsoft desperately needs to recover from the disaster that was Windows 8...' variety.