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Microsoft turned Windows 95 into a full-fledged multi-user operating system. Segmented user space? Unix had done that for years. All users where admin and it was horrible, but lot's of apps ran on it, so people bought it and used it. Then they merged Win95 into WinNT and gave us Windows 2000.

Now they are turning a full-fledged multi-user OS into a tablet OS. Let's make this tank into a bicycle. History tells us there will be a few painful years.

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Apple manged to turn a multi-user OS into a tablet OS, why can't Microsoft do it? The actual NT kernel is supposedly hardware-agnostic.

I am guessing that power management was simply not on the radar when NT was developed. Few people had laptops, and if they did, nobody expected more than an hour or two of battery life out of them, and nobody really cared too much about power consumption on desktops and servers.

For whatever reason they have not made power management a priority since then, maybe because it was easy (and at least somewhat correct) to blame 3rd party drivers. But in the Surface devices they have the same "known target" that Apple has always had with their hardware, so they should have been able to optimize for that, if they had wanted to.

Microsoft is more dedicated to backwards compatibility, way more dedicated. Apple mostly don't care about breaking something that's three years old if it means they can do some new thing. It's a tradeoff and they've both made their choices. Can't blame MS, their choice has served them well for a long time.

I'm curious to know what they took from W95 to give W2K. I've used NT3.5 and up and I didn't notice any w95 influence, unless you mean start button and desktop.

NT4 was the one that took cues from Windows 95—it took the desktop and start button, but it also took the whole grey UI/widget look. NT 3.5 had the same cheesy look and toy program launcher as Windows 3.1. NT4 was the first good windows version (though Windows 95 was the first to be almost as usable as the classic Mac OS).

As far as I remember Win2k was a refinement of NT4, not the same revolutionary leap as 3.5 to 4 was.

Those are mainly cosmetic changes. The other 99% was a whole new OS.

I'm not disagreeing that Windows 95 and Windows NT are completely different OSes. But I do disagree that it is "just" cosmetic—the desktop and forms APIs are the basis for the UI of the whole system. It's like saying Mac OS X -> iOS was just a cosmetic change, since much of the underlying OS and kernel are still the same.

Since Windows 3.1 to Windows XP, the aspect and look of the Font installer tool nearly not has changed. I could say that they keep the old 16 bit tool all time with minor changes.

XP : http://www.muhammadanism.com/Unicode/fonts_add.gif 98 : http://www.yearbooks.biz/assets/images/gallery/main/287.jpg 95 : http://www.mts.net/~pmorrow/pictures/ttfinst4.gif 3.1 : http://www.microsoft.com/typography/ttfinst/ttfinsta.gif

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