Windows 3.11 was credited as the first true "hit" version of Windows and the commercial success that the platform needed to be considered more than just an add-on for DOS.
It also carved out a niche for itself in the embedded market that would last for more than two decades. Windows for Workgroups was phenomenally successful as a platform for consoles, point of sale terminals, and workstations. Well into the 2000s, Windows 3.11 could be found in embedded devices. Just a few weeks ago, it was found that Orly Airport in France used Windows 3.11 to power a critical weather system, 23 years after its release and nearly 15 years after Microsoft pulled official support.
Windows XP SP2 was the version of XP that Microsoft got right. Three years after XP hit, Microsoft pushed out the second service pack and finally addressed some of the myriad of security problems that plagued XP.
Like Windows 3.11, XP SP2 has enjoyed a lifespan so long it has become troublesome. Despite Microsoft's best efforts to get people to upgrade their systems to newer versions, more than one in 10 PCs still rely on XP.
Windows 7 was another stellar release that came after a less-than-stellar predecessor. In this case, Windows 7 corrected a lot of the things that Vista got wrong, particularly security, performance, and hardware demands.
It may also be in for a lengthy run as the Windows release of choice. With Windows 8 bombing and many viewing Windows 10 with skepticism, Microsoft could once again find itself having to continue to support Windows 7 longer than it would want to.
The bad
Windows Vista was the long-awaited successor to Windows XP – perhaps that's part of why it is considered such a huge disappointment. After years of speculation and hype, Vista was roundly panned by critics and loathed by consumers.
Part of the problem was its hefty hardware requirements that, for many users, meant upgrading components or just buying an entirely new PC. Add to that performance issues and default security settings that would flood users with permission dialogues, and you get one of Microsoft's biggest flops.
Windows ME, however, was an even bigger flop than Vista. The final consumer-only version of Windows, its mere mention will draw cringes to this day. It was a buggy, sluggish mess of an operating system and is considered by many to be Microsoft's worst-ever Windows installment.
On top of being riddled with bugs, ME suffered from a rather unfortunate flaw in its system restore process that on some machines meant that when something did go seriously wrong, the OS could not be restored.
And what would any list of Microsoft failures be without ...
Microsoft Bob. The ill-fated attempt to provide an easy-to-use interface for people who had just purchased their first PC was an astoundingly huge flop that was trashed almost immediately and got discontinued after just one year.
For those lucky enough not to have used it, Bob placed the user in a "home" environment where various objects represented different applications. The aim was to make the PC less frustrating to use, but unfortunately it accomplished just the opposite.
Bob did end up having one useful application, however. An encrypted copy of Bob's data was used to fill space and discourage piracy on Windows XP install disks.
I’m surprised Windows NT didn’t make the “Good” list.
It was a pretty solid and long-lived OS in its day.
(From: Microsoft TechNet Magazine https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2008.07.windowsconfidential.aspx
Remember Microsoft Bob? It was intended to be a friendly user interface on top of Windows 3.1, but instead it flopped infamously (earning the dubious distinction of being named one of the worst technology products of all time by PC World). In the years that have passed since Bob's demise, the product has been relegated to the status of a running joke with the mere mention of its name drawing snickers.
Incidentally, Microsoft Bob's internal code name was "Utopia" -- an ambitious name to be sure, but at least one that had some snap and pizzazz. When we learned that the marketing folks had decided to name the product Bob, we all shook our heads in disbelief.
But there's more to Bob's legacy than you might know. It turns out Bob was actually more useful dead than alive.
When you intend to distribute your software on a CD, one thing you have to worry about is making sure your product actually fits on a single CD. Fortunately, it so happened that even after taking into account the disk space required for translations, support tools, and the other stuff that has to go onto the Windows XP CD, there was still about 30 megabytes of storage capacity remaining. The people who worry about these sorts of things figured, well, we already paid for all that storage capacity on the CD so we might as well use it, right?
The result was a rather feeble attempt to slow down the people who like to make illegal copies of Windows. Somebody decided to fill that extra capacity on the CD with dummy data and to have the Windows Setup program verify that the dummy data was still there. This, the logic went, would force people downloading a copy of the CD image to download an additional thirty or so megabytes of data. Remember, this was back in the day when "broadband" hadn't yet become a household word and mainstream users were using dial-up connections. Having to transfer an additional thirty megabytes of data over a 56Kb modem was a bit of an obstacle to slow users down—not that it would slow them down much by today's standards.
The person who was asked to implement this check needed a source for the dummy data. Now, he could have just called the CryptGenRandom function to generate 30 megabytes of cryptographically random bytes, but where's the fun in that? Instead, he dug through the archives and found a copy of Microsoft Bob. He took all the floppy disk images and combined them into one big file. The contents of the Microsoft Bob floppy disk images are not particularly random, so he decided to scramble up the data by encrypting it. When it came time to enter the encryption key, he just smashed his hand haphazardly across the keyboard and out came an encrypted copy of Microsoft Bob. That's what went into the unused space as ballast data on the Windows XP CD.
In the end, Windows XP became the most effective Microsoft Bob deployment tool ever developed. And if you go way back into your closet, dig out your copy of Windows XP, and can somehow channel the right spirits to mash your hands on the keyboard in exactly the right way, then out of your encryption program will come a copy of Microsoft Bob.
Dbase was enough for me.
Windows 3.11 was advanced and strange.