Hacker News Reader

Comment by musicale | Hacker News Reader

> When Windows ME and Windows Vista came out, people hated them even more than they usually hated Windows, so they did not use them. Microsoft was forced to respond by making a not-quite-as-bad OS in Windows XP

This timeline doesn't seem to make sense, as Windows XP came out in 2001, and Windows Vista in 2006-2007. Maybe you are referring to Service Pack 3 in 2008?

View on HN

Reactions to Windows ME forced MS to respond with XP; reactions to Vista forced them to respond with 7. They're being stated in parallel rather than chronologically.

This isn't quite right, Windows Me was a stopgap between Windows 98 and Windows XP. Microsoft had no intention of keeping anyone on Me for long. There were already plans to get consumers onto an NT-based OS when Me launched, the initial version of this was codenamed Neptune.

> Microsoft discussed a plan to delay Neptune in favor of an interim OS known as "Asteroid", which would have been an update to Windows 2000 (Windows NT 5.0), and have a consumer-oriented version. At the WinHEC conference on April 7, 1999, Steve Ballmer announced an updated version of Windows 98 known as Windows Millennium, breaking a promise made by Microsoft CEO Bill Gates in 1998 that Windows 98 would be the final consumer-oriented version of Windows to use the MS-DOS architecture. [0]

So XP was not a reaction to Me's reception, it was already in the works as a replacement when Me came out.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Windows_XP

I feel like everyone is forgetting Windows 2000, which IMO is the best Windows that MS ever released. The main problem with it was hardware support, since people were hesitant to move away from the 95/98/ME line, and hardware manufacturers were still playing catch-up, as most didn't support NT 3/4 at the time and didn't see a need, as it was largely a server/business OS. But otherwise it was rock solid, fast, and a breath of fresh air.

I did try XP here and there, but was instantly turned off by the cartoonish default theme (yes, I know you could change it). It was buggier than Win2k, and I didn't have the patience to wait around until they fixed it. I was told later on by people in the know that Service Pack 3 was the bees knees, but by then I'd moved on to Linux full-time (with some jaunts into OS X) and felt no need to come back.

Nope, XP was the introduction of Windows NT linage into mainstream computing, ME was basically 98 with a few goodies to keep selling newer 9x versions in the meantime.

Your quote is missing the end, required for it to make sense (irrelevant parts omitted):

> When Windows ME and Windows Vista came out [...]. Microsoft was forced to respond by making [...] Windows XP and [...] Windows 7 respectively.

It's basically from ME and Vista to XP and 7, respectively. AFAIK respectively in this context means that for ME, they were forced to respond with XP, and for Vista, they were forced to respond with 7.

Yes, this is what I meant.

Also to respond generally to other posts. I am aware of the the separation between NT and 9x. That was Microsoft's problem and not the customers' problem. They could not force people onto ME and had to actually appeal to customers with XP. Then later on, they could not force people onto Vista and had to actually appeal to customers with 7.

Automatic updates remove the step where they have to appeal to anybody.

And I don't mean to single out MS. I remember having a Mac and switching from some version of OS9 back to 8.6 for some reason (don't recall why, but it doesn't matter because it was my computer so it was my decision). Nowadays people are complaining about Liquid Glass and they cannot rollback their OS on their iDevices.

Indeed it makes no sense at all, because Windows 2000 even came out before Windows ME.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com