Only one problem with your hypothesis, you got a few things screwed up, the original release of 98 was balls, it was only better than 95, when 98SE the second edition came out it fixed a majority of the problems and further patching made it almost entirely flawless in operation, I mean sure it still had limitations and problems, but all software does.BrotherRool said:
Also Millenium edition, was a further extension on the 95/98 engine, also known as the 9x engine(I wonder why*sarcasm*), 2000 which was released the same year as ME was the upgrade on their office series also known as the NT series, NT3, and NT4 for instance, it was the NT5 engine, a new NT series OS, XP was when Microsoft officially abandoned the engine in their 9x OS' and moved to NT only, it was essencially NT5.1 an upgraded NT5 engine with a shinier more people friendly less office looking shell(essencially a new paintjob) but it came with a buncha problems which were mostly solved by the release of the first two service packs.
Vista was released early, with far less money spent on testing than they should have spent, and due to the clunkyness of their new interface, created to compete with the MacOS interfaces in the newer stuff, trying to appeal to a wider audience essencially, it used a ton of your system resources to just exist, therefor making the computers that were common at the time strain under it's load like a cat trying to carry a piano, that and the significant number of fixes that they had to apply to it to render it propperly usable, were immense, hence the gifting of a free W7 update to a large number of users who had to suffer with the innitial release, and W7 built on the engine basics of Vista was essencially rebuilt again, with a ton of inefficiencies chopped so it actually worked, while not flawless, it's still a decent OS.
Now, W8 they are trying once again to capture the market share dominated by Apple, except this time they're building a blanket OS for tablets(to compete with the iPad, and the large number of decent to awesome android tablets on the market) and for PCs so that they can have a cut of the app market craze and while they're doing this they are essencially ignoring all of the progress they made in the meantime with what they did with W7.
That is why most people are angry, it's not like ME(which during a live interview on TV wouldn't do anything but bluescreen and wouldn't even function long enough to even show anyone the interface) this is a failure in principle rather than a technical problem, they're essencially calling their main market chumps and moving on to a system because they see other companies making money on a similiar product type.
