Windows 7 improved due to netbooks
New computers don’t necessarily mean better, faster and 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 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.
