Unfortunately, that meant it became a mediocre OS instead of something befitting a marriage of OS/2 and VMS -- more stable, elegantly architected and secure. If you ever wonder why OS X is better than Windows XP, you can trace one reason to this 15-year-old decision.
And the overall point I was making still remains valid. That its sometimes necessary to take loses for some time on a product with a potentially very big market.
Absolutely valid, loss leaders can be a smart business tactic.
Practically everything is based on NT. XP, Win Server 2003, SQL Server and Exchange Server run on NT etc etc.
Sad, but true. Marketing ahead of quality usually wins because people accept low quality if they don't know any better. I would have preferred a harder migration from 3.1/9x to NT than to have NT be so bad. Apple did it the right way with OS X, a whole new OS to throw out the old garbage. There were some growing pains, but the OS is better for it. I belive Microsoft is finally doing this to some extent in Longhorn.