Well, Vista was a huge upgrade to XP. XP was an huge upgrade to 2000. 2000 upgraded NT, NT upgraded 98, and 98 upgraded 95. 95 was an upgrade to 3.1, which was an upgrade to MS-DOS. Ad nauseum. Every time they release an upgrade, they claim it is "as good as Apple" - but it never is.
Unfortunately, Microsoft is institutionally incapable of creating a truly great operating system. If they ever manage create one in the future, it won't be called "Windows".
I purchased my first Microsoft products in 1978. They had very good technology back then. I disassembled some of Bill Gates' code, and it was evident that he was a clever programmer. He had some wild tricks for fitting his code into a small memory space. That was the peak of Microsoft's technical quality, a long time ago when they handcrafted their code to make every byte count.
You had to... RAM was expensive. In 1980 I programed a Vic-20 in machine language to emulate a roulette wheel, complete with the sound of a decelerating bouncing ball, a whir of the rotating wheel and a display on the screen of the wheel, resolving to an image of the ball in the pocket of a slot on the wheel... with a quasi-random number generator to determine the slot. When I was finished, I had ONE byte of the 3583 Bytes of suser RAM space left. Any changes that used that one byte resulted in a crash. It was the wonder of my Lodge's annual casino night!