Comment Re:it's not like we didn't see this coming (Score 1) 791
I have to disagree. WfW 3.11, Windows 95's predecessor, wasn't all that stable either. Running more than a couple heavy programs at the same time could result in graphics blacking out as "resources" became exhausted, and you had to reboot the GUI to get them back. Driver installation was a royal pain, and there was still a heavy reliance on the DOS underpinnings that caused issues. Himem, Netbeui, MSCDEX, setting IRQ and IO port jumpers on everything and entering setting switches in config.sys - ugh! If a driver failed to load properly, the common failure mode was to sit at the Windows logo and do nothing.
I thought Windows 95 was an amazing release. It gave us real device management, 32 bit, and the start menu/taskbar UI that people clearly still don't want to give up. I don't remember a single person crying that they wanted the Program Manager back. There were big performance improvements too. "DOS boxes" worked a LOT better - you didn't need to exit back to DOS mode to do things nearly as often. And it had built-in TCP/IP. Of course there were some stability problems while third parties got up to speed with the new driver architecture, but overall I remember it working VERY well, considering the massive amount of change that took place.
OSR2, 98, and 98SE all seemed like incremental improvements (largely to support hardware evolution - better USB support, FAT32 file system to handle larger hard disks, etc). ME was a half-baked release - It took away some things and didn't offer a lot in return. MS'es efforts were clearly in Windows 2000 at this point (as they should). XP seemed to be what all of their efforts were working towards - it brought the NT kernel into the mainstream with additional compatibility modes. They did such a good job with XP, it's as if MS didn't know where to go from here. XP's only achilles heel seemed to be with security.
Since then it seems like they're changing things for the sake of change. I'm not even all that impressed with Windows 7. Nothing wrong with it, but it feels more like a refined Vista to me, and Vista didn't seem like a terribly big step up from XP. The biggest reason to switch to Windows 7 (or Vista) is to get mainstream 64 bit support. And even that could have happened under XP had it not been EOL'ed, since there is a 64 bit version. Now we have windows 8, with is a step backwards aesthetically (subject to opinion, of course, but Aeroglass was added to Vista for a reason), as well as functionally, unless you have a touch screen where the new Metro interface has some value. They could have simply added a Metro "ecosystem" as an alternative shell, just as they did with Media Center. Instead they've decided to remove something as fundamental as the Start menu, and push everyone towards UI stylings that could have been rendered in the 80's with an EGA adapter. I'm just not feeling it.