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Comment by binxbolling | Hacker News Reader

It's bizarre to lump Win XP in with duds like Me and Vista. Isn't XP, by most measures, an unmitigated success?

(You might not think it's great personally, but it's certainly not the case that MS has had no blockbusters since Win 95.)

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I'd say that Windows 7 was an unmitigated success.

As for XP, without a doubt. Considering it still holds the second largest market share (behind Win7). Impressive given that it is 12 years old now.

XP was the first decent Windows release since Windows 95, and consumers adopted it en masse. However, it was riddled with security flaws and that makes it less attractive when looking at it in hindsight.

> XP was the first decent Windows release since Windows 95

I'm sure you mean "2000" not "XP".

What I should have said was that XP was the first decent consumer-focused release since Windows 95. 2000 had a good codebase, but an abysmal adoption rate.

> 2000 had a good codebase, but an abysmal adoption rate.

Yes, which kinda-sorta was expected as it was still considered part of the NT-line and not a consumer OS, and WinME was released after it.

Still, it was a perfectly good consumer OS (IIRC, 2000 was the original merge point of the NT and 9x lines, then the building base for Project Neptune which fell through and ultimately lead to Whistler after 2000's release), much better than WinME could ever be, and I only reluctantly switched to WinXP (to try AoE III which refused to install on 2000, of all things)

Actually NT 4 was already quite good.

As soon as I got access to Windows NT 4 Workstation, it became my Windows default install, alongside Mandrake Linux back in the day.

I liked 2k pretty much. I was good for their time and I wish MS would have continued to make operating systems for people who just need an operating system.

XP was the first consumer OS with the NT kernel. It was a success but it was never recognized as very innovative. Which it wasn't.

Even Microsoft gave it a point release (5.1) on top of Windows 2000 (5.0)

Anecdotal but when I upgraded from Windows 2000 to Windows XP, I actually noticed faster boot time. It still took over three minutes on my old machine though.

It wasn't innovative if you were looking at the basic features, but for consumers, it was the first update from Windows 95 or 98, and bringing them an (at the time) fresh and new OS built on top of a new (for them) kernel with a bunch of features that made it that much better. Of course, I'd say XP wasn't 'done' until SP 2, given how it quickly became the primary target for virusses and whatnot.

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