From a pure business/revenue standpoint, Vista did not fail, even though it didn't get the "wow factor" MS was hoping for... Home users generally don't downgrade to XP unless they've been exposed to the negative buzz around it, and it's perfectly normal for business to lag behind in adoption. The exact same thing happened to XP, since all the companies I worked for or visited were running Windows 2000 Pro in 2004/2005... It wasn't until MS officially pulled the plug on Win2K that they actually started upgrading to XP.
However, from a marketing/brand image standpoint it did, in fact, fail. Vista was expected to be Microsoft's OS X, i.e. an operating system that creates pride of ownership. However, the exact opposite happened, and despite the fact that the rollout wasn't that much different from all previous releases, and people encountered the same driver problems and performance issues they did back in the early 00s (especially on older machines), the wave of hate it generated is unprecedented. I personally believe it to be a result of Microsoft's failure to adapt to the dramatic shifts in the PC landscape that have happened since 2001.
The Blogosphere:
-----------------
Blogs barely existed during the rollout of Windows XP, and technology pundits usually tend to be very professional in their writing style, and their criticism has to be objectively weighed or at least appear that way. On blogs, however, rumors spread like wildfire, bandwagon effects are much more prominent, and as much as one valid criticism generates a thousand "ad hominems", thereby amplifying the original criticism and blowing it out of proportion.
Overheated Expectations:
-------------------------
The original Longhorn project was very, very audacious and, therefore, infeasible.... However, the premature release of development plans caused people to expect Vista to have everything they can imagine, even a kitchen sink...
"Open Sourcerers":
------------------
There is nothing wrong with open source... as long as it's presented as a business decision for a specific line of products rather than a religion... The Blogosphere seems to be dominated by Richard Stallman types who believe all software should be free, and releasing anything commercially or trying to gain market share is a crime against humanity... They might be a minority, but typically they are the firestarters, and they have an enormous influence on the Internet's general consensus. From the nature of comments, it appears that today's CNet is yesterday's Slashdot. The proportion of Vista-hating posts that mention Linux by far exceeds its actual market share. Again, there's nothing wrong with Linux, but some people feel that it somehow makes them superior to everyone else. Whereas the open source community is known for "religious wars" (Gnome vs. KDE, PHP versus Python, emacs versus vi), business-oriented users try to make rational decisions based on the relative merits of each product, and it's not uncommon to see mixed infrastructures where OSS and commercial software deployments peacefully coexist... But the most zealous folks are the ones making most of the noise.
I personally believe there is some truth to the Mojave Experiment despite it being conducted by Microsoft. Most people who avoid Vista either out of conformity (without even trying it) or based on company-specific business decisions (e.g. if they have very old software that doesn't run on Vista). From my personal experience, people who weren't exposed to all the buzz generally liked it. And it seems like people have forgotten that in the Age of XP, most valid attacks on Windows had to do with security. That's the problem that Vista was quite successful at solving by making some trade-offs in performance and usability... but now all of a sudden everyone's screaming "performance"... after trying to run it on a machine it wasn't written for. Then again, there's another trade-off... Hardware requirements vs. performance on top-notch hardware.
Oh well.... I personally believe that Microsoft should try to somehow shed its "evil" stigma and solve the "hate problem" that seems to be getting out of control. In my opinion, MS is neither Good nor Evil. It's just a company. Like any other company, it has strengths and weaknesses. Like any other company, it wants to make profit and get market share. But other companies manage to get away with much more trouble than Vista's worst nightmares. Try to imagine what would have happened if MS started transitioning everyone to a non-x86 platform, breaking compatibility and announced that Visual Studio 2010 would need a paid upgrade to run on the new platform... There would probably be riots in the streets. But Apple did it to its own users without any damage to its reputation. I'm not saying that Microsoft should shoot for being able to pull off the same trick. However, it should look for ways to prevent minor but valid criticisms or general skepticism from turning into a colossal wave of hate.
I do not even think that Office 03 works in Vista as well. Both of those titles are costly upgrades.... Luckily for me, I was able to get a copy of Office 07 thru my school student program and Nero 8 from a friend. 
.
