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Comment by yRetsyM | Hacker News Reader

I can't help but think that Vista -> Windows 7 is an example of this pattern.

    Win3  > Win3.1
    Win95 > Win98
    WinME > WinXP
    Vista > Win7
    Win8  > ? (unlikely to be 8.1)

Was Win95 a failure? From what I remember, it was a huge, smashing success for them.

Wasn't 95 the first "full" DE and sligthly better game support? With 3.1 you'd still boot into DOS and start up windows to play solitaire.

DOS was still there under the hood. It wasn't until Windows XP that they officially killed off DOS (there was a cheesy skit about this at the launch event with Bill Gates killing off DOS).

And suddenly old game compatibility was much iffier. Good thing DOSBox stepped up.

WindowsME was a band-aid. It wasn't meant to exist. Windows2K was supposed to be the release that merged the Win9x and WinNT worlds. It didn't end up working, so Windows2000 was released as the next version of the WindowsNT line (WinNT 5.0) and Windows XP (WinNT 5.1) did what it was supposed to do.

There are probably some parallels to Longhorn/Vista. Except it seems like with Vista Microsoft bit off a lot more than they could chew, and had to massively scale things back for release.

... ME -> XP -> Vista -> 7 -> 8 ...

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