Errr, yes I did..............

According to Wikipedia, button pushing is trolling (in the original sense that is).

In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory,[2] extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking readers into an emotional response[3] or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion
I rest my case

I really don't understand your obsessive distaste for VMS as I have worked in numerous environments where it was used very successfully. Please remember that it is an operating system that was designed and written to run DEC/VAX hardware. In that respect it is more like IBMs OS/34, OS/38 and OS/400, and is certainly not an "academic" universal, development like Unix or Linux.

Microsoft is a strange case, as it is hard to really define a consistent design strategy over time. It all seems to be very marketing driven.

They started off by buying DOS and developing progressive versions, and of their "Windows" GUI for it. With Windows 95 they tried to integrate the DOS OS with the Windows GUI. They were also developing NT4.0 at the same time, and obviously didn't have enough resources for the two projects.

[Ever wondered why there are 4 .bas files in the NT4.0 Systems Folder? ]

I guess everything finally worked out with Win98SE and Windows 2000 Pro.

Then they launched their next OS which was XP and intended to integrate all their desktop products. This pretty much worked from the start.....with 3 SPs in 11 years as opposed to 6 in under 5 for NT4.0

Vista is obviously another new development, was delivered late, and again they didn't quite get it right.

Windows7 I would say is the corrected version of that, and Windows8 is just an enhanced version of Windows7.

You can't really identify a continuous "based on" because these are commercial products that are intended to have an EOL, and be replaced with something different.

If you are looking for continuity, I would say that so far (with the notable exception of XP), whenever they have tried something really innovative, it hasn't worked first time out.

It is far easier to see strategy and continuity in Apple's products, but they have to have a much more cautious and disciplined approach because of the interdependency of their OS and hardware businesses. They certainly couldn't afford a Vista or ME

Well that's just my take on it.