In 2000, Microsoft had no idea that their current project, Windows ME, would be such a failure in the computer industry.

What should be considered the greatest computer product failure? The worst operating system ever made? Such questions always lead to some controversy, but at the same time, leave a lot of people coming to the same conclusion: “That award goes to Windows ME."

But this leads to another interesting question: What about Windows ME? You know, the OS which came out right after Windows 98 in the year 2000, intended to set Microsoft up for the 21st century, ME standing for “Millennium Edition.” Even though it was meant to be just another improvement of Windows, that ended up not being case. Instead, customers were just left furious, wondering why Microsoft would push out such an obviously incomplete and terrible product. Consequently, Windows ME has since been labeled by many tech enthusiasts as “the Worst Operating System of All Time.” That’s a pretty harsh and defamatory label, so what on earth did Microsoft do? I like to think of Windows ME as the emo phase of Microsoft. They were clearly having a bit of an identity crisis and figuring out how to properly express themselves. They didn’t know what they wanted the future of Windows to be.

To further add to this, Microsoft made the wise decision of releasing a very similar looking version of Windows called Windows 2000 at around the same time as Windows “Millenium” Edition. In fact, I have to admit, while doing my research, there were a few times where I actually found myself mixing up Windows ME with Windows 2000, and I frantically had to make changes. It was a pretty silly mistake, but it wasn’t exactly an uncommon one either, at least in the year 2000. You see, during this time, the upcoming Windows 2000 and Windows ME operating systems were both being marketed in similar but different ways. Windows 2000 was going to be the business-oriented version of Windows, whereas Windows ME was going to be strictly for consumers, home users. Because of this, these were, respectively, just upgrades of Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 98. Windows 2000 was built on the newer, more stable Windows NT codebase while Windows ME was still built on the 9x codebase, which was quickly becoming outdated and unstable. But a lot of users didn’t know this, for reasons that I will get into later.

Instead, they thought they were essentially just getting a home version of Windows 2000, which was released seven months prior, but this actually wasn’t the case. The reality is, the two versions may have appeared similar, but were different, VERY different. And after people made their upgrades, this became quickly apparent, and ME seemed to be the exact opposite of their expectations. Blue screen of deaths plagued the system, sometimes when the user wasn’t even running any programs. Lack of a DOS mode from previous versions made it incredibly difficult for users to install older software, and of course, frequent hardware compatibility issues made the OS virtually unusable. But it all really boils down to one question: Is Windows ME really deserving of such a reputation as the worst operating system, or was it similar to Windows Vista and just, partially, misunderstood? Today, we are going to talk about what exactly led Windows ME to be so heavily criticized and whether or not much of it is even warranted.

Windows ME’s infamous legacy seems to stem from what typically goes wrong with most failed Microsoft products, the development and marketing. The issues that were particular to Windows ME was miscommunication on Microsoft’s end, the operating system’s lack of recognition, and of course, it’s lack of capability. I mentioned that a huge component of Windows ME’s downfall was the fact that it was controversially based on a separate kernel from Windows 2000, but we really need to understand why this was the case. It might be surprising since it came out a year later, but one thing that was significantly responsible for ME’s downfall was the development of Windows XP. Just at the start of XP’s development, Microsoft mentioned that they were working on a new version of Windows codenamed Neptune. This was meant to be the very first consumer-based Windows that would be built on the NT platform.


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