Shponglefan wrote on 2023-10-26, 21:44:
I was focusing on consumer operating systems. I skipped Windows Me as well, since nobody really used it (at least not that I knew of).
Especially from a gaming perspective, where as games required newer OSs, you didn't much of a choice but to upgrade.
That's why I find it a bit astounding now at how much slower the pace has been. And when people complain about being forced to upgrade (such as with Steam dropping Win 7/8 support), I think some perspective is warranted. Being able to run and game on the same OS for over a decade is a luxury we didn't use to have.
What I would say about Windows Me is this - plenty of people used it. My mom had a laptop with it. Your typical university student who, today, would have a Mac, back then would have had a Dell or Toshiba with Windows Me. Etc. For about a year and a bit before the release of XP, most consumer machines would have come with Me, and... many of these never got upgraded to XP, especially since product activation meant that, for the first time, you couldn't easily just... "bend"... the rules... and upgrade your mom or sister with a disc you already bought for yourself.
But that's mainstream consumers. Businesses went from 98SE to 2000 - by the time 2000 came out, businesses could afford computers capable of running NT, which was... not at all the case in the days of NT4/95/98. 95/98 were widely, widely used in business because people just couldn't afford NT-capable machines for ordinary productivity tasks. And I think some business features were removed from Me, just in case some businesses didn't get the hint and open their wallets for 2000.
I think non-super-serious-gamer enthusiasts were largely on the 2000 front by the time Me came out. One thing that I think is under, underappreciated is just how unstable 98SE was on the machines from ~2000 with enough RAM for multitasking and always-on broadband Internet connections. I could take my Dell PIII I foolishly ordered with 98SE in summer 2000 and, 20-30 minutes after rebooting, destroy it by running out of system resources. The same machine, with a little extra RAM, could do the same workloads on 2000 and not be rebooted for months.
Did 2000 have compatibility issues? Yes. Did some games get left behind? Yes. But for people who were not super-serious gamers (and that would certainly include me), the benefits of 2000's stability were worth it, even if it meant abandoning a 6-12 month old game you liked or a 1-2 year old scanner whose manufacturer didn't want to support 2000.
The pace has changed because, fundamentally, Windows 2000 was the last upgrade of Windows that gave you a dramatic 'OMG this is amazing! I can do so much more than yesterday' feeling. XP was fine, but despite all the XP love today, XP pre-SP1 was less stable and a lot more resource-hungry than 2000, so while 98SE/Me users embraced XP as their first breath of NT, 2000 fans were... not that excited about it.
Shponglefan wrote on 2023-10-26, 21:44:
People were very, very eager to embrace new operating systems until, well, Vista, because, for most people, every operating system they had used prior to XP was garbage. (Win2000 fans, obviously, would disagree, but not that many people used 2000). So the bar was really "is Win98 RTM on release day any worse than Win95?" and the answer was usually no.
I'd throw Me into the 'garbage' mix, although I guess not people even used it to begin with.
See above. By the time Me came out, most people who cared about these things had abandoned the sinking 9x ship.
I don't think Me was any worse than 98SE; it was lacking some DOS compatibility features and some businessy features, was a little prettier, etc. But... I think you have to look at the hardware. And how the hardware had evolved so much between 1995 and 2000 that the hardware in 2000 was way too good for the 9x family's compromised architecture.
In 1995, I was running Win95 (bought it on release day) on a non-Intel 486DX2/50 with 8 megs of RAM. Ran great, even better after I upgraded to 20 megs of RAM. In 2000, I had 98SE on a PIII 700 with 128 megs of RAM, which was a huge mistake. In 2001, my mom and university friends had this low-end Toshiba laptop model with Me... 128 megs of RAM, I am trying to remember what the processor was, maybe a Celeron 800? That was way, way, way too much hardware for a 9x-family OS.
Shponglefan wrote on 2023-10-26, 21:44:I do remember for a time treating consumer Windows operating systems like Star Trek movies: every other one was good.
"Every other one was good" is... a rule that was invented after the Windows 8 idiocy and trying to lump in Windows 8 with the poorly-regarded Vista.
And frankly, I still, to this day, will defend Vista. If you had good hardware with the proper GPU support for Aero Glass, an acceptable quantity of RAM, etc, Vista was a perfectly competent operating system. I actually would go even further and say that I think pre-SP1 Vista was better than pre-SP1 XP. (Pre-SP1 XP had a dreadful taskbar-freezing bug among other issues).
But the world i) had bad hardware (especially thanks to Intel and their bad onboard graphics), and ii) was comparing RTM Vista with post-SP2 XP, which was the most mature OS that the Windows/PC world had ever seen. And so Vista flopped.
For the record, as a Windows enthusiast since 1995 (and someone who has run every Windows version, if not at release date or through the public betas/insider program, then in the first few months after its release, on some machines or other since 1995), I have only considered two versions bad, and interestingly, for the same reason:
1) Windows 8 - what do you mean, you're trying to turn my high-end desktop with a 1920x1200 monitor into a tablet with your crazy full-screen interface?
2) Windows 11 - what do you mean, my then-4 year old i7 7700 with NVMe SSDs, 64GB of RAM, doesn't meet your "performance and reliability expectations" and isn't worthy of officially-supported Windows 11 when a one-year newer Celeron Jxxxx with 4 gigs of RAM and eMMC storage is fine?
And the reason is the same in both cases: Microsoft broke an implied promise that if you had good-quality high-end hardware, you'd have a good experience with the next versions of Windows.