They obviously never ran Windows Me. I think that was the worst OS by Microsoft I’ve ever seen, and I currently run Vista 64 bit, which had some compatibility problems with some programs I tried to run, but its been much better since SP1. Windows Millinium aka Windows Me was a buggy, slow, cronically crashing POS no matter what updates they released.
I think Vista’s failure was all the changes it made to areas of the control panel and administrative interfaces which consolidated them, but the names for these were too vague, and functions that were related got spread all over the place. The OS from an administrative standpoint just blew. They also went overboard with the notification features. I hope they do a better job with Windows 7.
The only added feature I've seen in Windows is that the constant balloon popups are like having a free "Duck Hunt" game on the computer. The absolute most annoying one to me is "You have unused icons on your desktop! Click here to clean them up!"
I dont think the run up to ME was anywhere near Vista after all when ME came out you had XP in the works and 98 was only a few years old. When Vista came out MS had went more than half a decade and numerous setbacks because ‘they were going to get it right’ in the end Vista was a phenomenally AVERAGE PRODUCT which considering the buildup and the money behind it made it a far bigger fiasco than ME.