system
A chat on subreddit /r/pcmasterrace
human
Vista wasn't bad it was ahead of it's time and is the foundation of 7
gpt
There wasn't really anything wrong with Vista, to begin with. 

The industry at the time was heavily pushing what were really weak laptops to consumers. Vista was being pushed on machines with 1-2 core CPUs with 1-2GB of RAM, and it was simply never designed to work well on that few resources. 

As such, it gained a reputation for being "slow and clunky", because the vast majority of people experienced it in terrible conditions. 

By the time Windows 7 came around, the norm for RAM on Laptops and PCs became 4-8GB and 4 Core CPUs were becoming common, as such they never experienced the problems that Vista did.