Comment by estebank

I don't think that qualifying XP as merely 2000 with a facelift is not entirely fair. XP benefited from having drivers produced for 2000 by the time it came out, but it also had additional compatibility shims to allow almost every Windows application in existence to work (in 32bits). 2000 was a great OS, that I liked, but it wasn't ready for consumers (not dissimilar to the Vista/7 situation). I believe that waiting until XP for the NT kernel big push was the right one, even if it gave us Me which was likely the worst release of the OS.