Maybe I was too young but honestly I didn’t care at all. Was it colorful and super contrasted ? Yes. But it was not, at least to me, ugly.

Sure, coming from gray OSes from the 90’s, it could have appeared as "childish" but I really think this was just because people somehow internalized that "pro = sad gray". And for what its worth, I’m still convinced that we never had something better than the slightly 3D beige controls of Windows XP.

Now, any app is more colored than Windows XP but nothing is coherent anymore, there is no more "OS look" anywhere, it’s just the applications, their colors and their branding. Even Apple is losing this battle update after update.

I think it (metaphorically) says something about how we lost control of our computers.

On the other hand, Windows 98 looked like it was designed by 1955 IBM. It may have been an overcorrection but it was certainly a welcome one.

It introduced theme support through, so first thing I always did was to switch to the Windows 2000 theme.

I always turned it off so it looked more like Windows 2000.