01-09-2007, 05:20 AM
Do you want a complete list of the things that amost doomed it? This is a short list: around 2002 they realized that for every six months they worked on it, it was getting only 1 month closer to "shipping in 12 months." They threw out about half the code and started fresh. Then they rewrote about half of that because of the "Secure Computing Initiative." With the hardware requirements that Vista seems to need, I would guess that they actually delayed it on purpose until a large number of new computers shipping were 64 bit and had 1 GB of RAM.