The one thing that Microsoft did succeed (and fail) on, however, was a line of operating systems that first started off with a weird fork of Windows Small Business Server 2003, intended to be marketed towards families only. Surprisingly, the tablet line ARM32 Windows 8 first shipped on somehow managed to survive and evolve, although I think its more powerful 64-bit Intel CPU counterpart is probably why it even managed to survive freefall in the first place.

This thing, which died a horrible, undeserved death because of entirely arbitrary software limitations enforced by product policies and a heavily flawed EFI code signing policy used by the Code Integrity library (CI.dll) that crippled NT so badly, it was only able to run apps from the not-truly-dead Windows Store or Microsoft-signed apps, or both.They canned the idea of shipping a Windows 7 variant that lacks a basic internet browser (because the European Commission exists, and it does not like corporate greed at all) days after it had already gone out to manufacturers because Microsoft realized that it was literally just a usability nightmare in the sense that people wouldn't really be able to figure out how or where to get a web browser of their choice without a web browser, so they instead opted for a choice ballot that later shipped in a cumulative update, with much fanfare.Related: a bucket list was once Windows XP's successor.Cool design visions though, sucks that it ended like that. (Spoiler alert: it only made things worse, by the way.) Instead, they threw almost all of it into a dumpster and started all over from scratch. Feature creep happened, and they tried to split the whole OS into individual components to prevent feature creep from becoming a much larger development problem. They executed their initial idea of Vista horribly between May 2002 - 19th August 2004 because everything they touched or created was quite literally running on Managed C#/.NET, a la Midas' touch.A certain galaxy that's set to enter a crash course with the Milky Way within a few billion years.An attempt to develop 2000s-era Windows 8.x (w/ features that later shipped in Windows 8 through 11, e.g: build upgrades and fast startup) was made.It's not too unusual for Microsoft to pull off a bunch of weird or overly ambitious shit to get a new release of Windows shipped and marketed to consumers, businesses, oil-hungry governments with zero regard for human lives and the like.

Windows server 2003 startup sound