When a new market of small-factor computers became very popular last year, Microsoft wasn't feeling too hot. Linux and Windows XP were being used, and the consumers buying these PCs were not able to take advantage of all the hard work that had gone into Vista. It didn't matter that with Vista SP1, the operating system was running better than its XP on higher-end machines. New computers don't necessarily mean better, faster, stronger anymore. Netbooks mean smaller, cheaper, lighter, and many consumers are quite happy to use XP, the operating system they had gotten used to during Vista's unusually long development. Microsoft simply did not foresee this new trend occurring when it was working on Vista; the demand for the inexpensive netbooks began to skyrocket even before the economic downturn.

Windows 7 further takes advantages of the improvements in Vista, adds a few features here and there, and also focuses a ton on performance. For the first time ever, Microsoft has promised it would aim to keep the same hardware requirements of a future operating system the same as its predecessor. Hardware leaps will still continue, but Windows 7 is already outperforming XP and Vista on current hardware.

If it wasn't for the netbook, that would have never happened; Microsoft is very much aware that it's not going to make much money offering XP on netbooks forever. So it's really no surprise that when Microsoft announced the Windows 7 editions last month, it promised that all editions would run on netbooks. To achieve this goal, the company has been tweaking like no tomorrow. It's never bothered doing that with a new Windows release, at least not to the extent that it is doing with Windows 7.

Vista SP2 is almost ready for prime time, and while the second service pack improves performance yet again, most people really just want Windows 7, whether that's for checking e-mail on their netbook, or for gaming on the latest hardware. If you plan on adopting Windows 7, you have the netbook to be thankful for, because Vista's successor would be a very different beast if Microsoft had less motivation to pursue performance.