It's the circle of life, companies eventually get captured by accountants and lose their initial spark. Even companies like Microsoft had an era of exciting innovation.
Less and even less.
yes it was just a joke, wordplay, really.
I barely used windows for workgroups. but I did use windows from XP or 95 onwards. actually I used both. and yeah I remember a bit about the hardware discovery. it was called plug and play, iirc.
I remember reading how badly windows Vista turned out.
and then there was 8, which I didn't check out much, but remember reading it was somewhat of a flop, because they tried to make everything mobile oriented, even on desktops.
haven't used windows much since, except for 7, which was okay for me.