Windows Me - Microsoft's Biggest Failure

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newer, more stable Windows NT codebase while Windows ME was still built on the 9x codebase, which was quickly becoming outdated and unstable.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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- Swingadee
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- Hannah Marsh
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[gracefullynadine]

The first family computer had ME. So I grew up thinking computers were all just unstable crash machines.

[earthboiproductions]

Fun fact: Just to show how much confusion there was (and still is) around Windows ME and 2000, the Windows ME Wikipedia article actually says *”Not to be confused with Windows 2000”* at the top.

[roygaya]

I think Windows ME shaped my professional career. When I was a kid I was already used to format the C drive, diagnose the programs in safe mode, creating recovery floppy disks, reinstall the system from scratch, install the drivers, ... All that was a natural path to follow... Thanks Windows ME! 🙂

[KayleeCee]

My older brother was all proud when he brought home a copy of ME to install on the home computer. He was hyping it up like it was the second coming. I think it lasted about 2 weeks on our computer. My mom literally told him to "get rid of this shit". We went back to 98.

[alexgreen]

Trying to coax Millennium Edition into working properly as a child literally set my career as a computer engineer

[jqlio]

Because ME was my first OS I became very good at debugging OSs even today.

[sayyedal-afghani]

A few notes from someone who remembers the era well:

(1) Microsoft had been trying to move over to the NT line much earlier than this video implies. I knew people who worked at Microsoft and the original game plan was for Windows 95 to be the last (and only) consumer 9x OS, while Windows 3.51 was supposed to be the last strictly business oriented version of NT. Windows NT 4.0 was slated to become what XP eventually became- the version of Windows which merged the consumer and business lines.. As early as 1993, Microsoft had started taking steps in that direction with Win32s- an environment to run 32 bit programs in the 16 bit DOS/Windows 3.x environment. For various reasons, NT 4.0 never became the version of Windows which combined the two platforms.

(2) Windows 95 was finally released to great fanfare. For the average consumer, DOS was gone, but those of us who understood the technology knew DOS was still there- you could even make it rear its ugly head by changing the config file so it would drop you into a DOS prompt instead of the GUI. Windows 9x used the same thunking technology that Win32s used and it could sometimes create instability. But consumers seemed happy with Windows 95 so Microsoft sort of delayed the move to consumer NT. Microsoft had bigger fish to fry such as the fact that they had been caught with their pants down when the internet was taking off and they weren't a major player (at that point). Besides, PC gaming was just starting to become a really big thing at that point and much of that was DOS games. The way Windows 9.x handled DOS programs was different than the way Windows NT handled them. The NT VDM was more elegant than the 9x solution, but the downside was that NT had little tolerance for games which tried to access the hardware directly- which was pretty much all DOS games. So Windows 98 was supposed to be the stopgap- one last DOS based Windows before it was merged into NT.

(3) Until a few months before the release of Windows NT 5.0, Microsoft intended for it to be the first consumer release of NT. They had even named it Windows 2000 with a "Professional" and "Home" edition. Windows 2000 was actually the first version which provided an upgrade path from Windows 9x to Windows NT- you could upgrade from Windows 98 to Windows 2000. But the Windows 2000 Home edition was never released. Why? I remember upgrading from Windows 98 to 2000 and I was excited until the upgrade was complete and released my modem and sound card were not working. No drivers so I ended up buying a new modem and sound card. I had better luck with 16 bit Windows and DOS games, but it was maybe an 80% success rate- much better than NT 4.0, but still unacceptable for a consumer version of Windows at the time.

(4) So Microsoft once again moved the line in the sand- Whistler (ie. XP) was to be the first consumer NT OS. Still, this left Microsoft with a long period (at the time) between consumer editions. Sure, Windows 98SE was as different from (the original) 98 as 98 was from 95, but that wasn't the public's perception. Windows 98 Second Edition was never marketed as a new version of Windows- it was mostly an OEM release while stores quietly replaced the old Win 98 with the SE edition. So the decision was made to release Windows ME. Somehow, ME and Vista are lumped together as the two worst versions of Windows, but that's where the similarities end. Windows Vista's biggest flaw was it was too much. ME's biggest flaw was it was just a bunch of shit basically all thrown together. Even after MS had decided that Whistler would be THE Operating System, they continued creating nightly builds of the Windows 9x line. Maybe the plan was to create some legacy OS for very very low end computers (or specialized markets like POS register systems). This OS became Windows ME and Microsoft knew it was the mistake edition from the moment it was released...

[arnautarnautsen]

During Vista (!) time, I met a former senior manager for Microsoft. She told me that nobody in Microsoft *ever* mentioned ME, and referred to it as "that OS".

[darthrainbows]

My first day college, I installed Windows ME on my PC, and it brought down the entire college network. After tracking down my PC as the source and running some tests, the IT department banned the OS from campus.

[CamiloSinger]

As a kid I remember my dad upgraded our PC with 98SE to ME. It lasted about a day before we reverted back to 98. Crashes all around, absolutely awful. Then when I got my own PC with XP in it, it felt like a quantum leap in every single aspect.

[MostafaAhmedAhmed]

I was a computer science student at this time. Windows 98 was my first Windows ever. While more stable than ME, ME felt more modern and faster. However, it was very fragile and needed to reinstall it every 3 months. But I loved it.
Despite the similarities between ME and 2000, they were never the same. 2000 was my first attempt with an NT-based system, and I felt it from the beginning. May be because computer was my specialty. But apart from that, 2000 was certainly not suitable for consumers. However, it was way more robust, smoother, and its UI was more advanced than 9x. XP made all that easier for consumers after that.
I used ME for only a year or so, but it’s still very nostalgic for me.

[stew]

I loved the minimalism of windows 2000. To me, it was the best business OS.

[looweegee]

I can remember in high school I was trying to explain to my friend why Windows XP was better than Me.

He really wouldn't budge. That was the day I learned about how stubborn narcissistic people can be. I wonder if he's still out there somewhere using Windows Me...

[Brendan-Fraser]

The ME actually stood for Major Embarrassment.

[dvogonen]

I lead a group that developed security software for Windows. We replaced core parts of the OS and shipped software tailored for each Windows flavor (W95, W98, W98SE, NT4, W2000). When ME came out we took a look under the hood, quickly realized that it was a technical disaster with countless bugs. Most machines we tried simply could not run it. So no support from us. I have always suspected that Microsoft intentionally torpedoed ME to kill off the W95 branch and move people on to NT. The reason people kept using W95/W98 was that it could run on the first generation single core Pentium machines and even 486es.For NT you needed to scrap your three year old PC and get a new one, which people did not want to do.

[LrdGgabyt]

I remember running an RC3 build of ME back in late 1999. It was fast, behaved well, and had a lot of really cool features. Somewhere between RC3 and Gold, MS really dropped the ball. Many of the new things did make it into XP though.

[TheOneGuy]

Amusingly as a kid, I never knew of Windows ME's existence. My family's computer went from 95 to 98 to XP (Before 95 I was too young to comprehend what OS they ran and beyond XP I was older and more aware of the situation, even having my own personal computer), so for a long time I just figured XP was the Windows OS after 98.

[KwanLowe]

I remember Windows ME. When it crashed -- and it crashed often -- it didn't just crash. It crashed with prejudice, taking the filesystem along with it. I remember major disk corruption issues after a crash, many that required a re-install.

[hhhsp]

Windows ME is actually just Windows 1000

[ragankelly]

Windows ME was a misunderstood failure, for a lot of reasons.

This video gets a lot right, but overplays the role of Neptune and Whistler. Most people didn't keep up on those things, and power-users knew the difference. If you knew what Whistler was, you also knew Me wasn't it. That's just not something I heard much confusion over at the time. Absolutely if you were just buying a computer and didn't read up on news (or rumors) about MS, like most people, you wouldn't have known moving to NT was a thing - I would guess most people at the time didn't know what NT was unless they had a reason to. It was never marketed to consumers, and was even discouraged for home use.

First problem then, was the name. Calling the follow-up to 95 and 98 "Me", and the follow-up to NT4 "2000" confused a lot of people. I mean, they switched the numbered version, and the letter version's name - and a majority of people (aside from computer geeks) I knew at the time assumed Windows 2000 was the new Windows 95. I had awkward conversations trying to explain NT to people. People still believe 2000 was the successor to 95/98.

Then, marketing. The OS sort of came out of nowhere, and 98se was still popular (it was still recent). With the name confusion already an issue, the marketing consisted of ads saying "Meet Me!" and touting things that probably weren't accurate (much like Vista's marketing).

The big concern back then with consumers was two things: speed, and crashing. Everyone complained that their computer was too slow, regardless of how fast it really was, and crashing was 9x's biggest feature. So the question people would ask when a new thing came out was "will this make my computer faster?" Almost always. Pushing out a new version of Windows like this made people assume their computers would be faster (nope) and crash less (nope). Anyone who upgraded expecting those was gravely disappointed. Which is to say, pretty much everyone who installed it.

The weird thing is, it actually almost was a great OS. Underneath, it was basically Windows 98 Third Edition. It seems more stable and actually less prone to crashes. I used it for almost a decade, and it worked great...however, I didn't use the normal version. More on that later...

As noted, DOS mode was removed, while the DOS Prompt inside Windows remained. However, in reality, DOS was still there. As with most Me issues, the features were simply locked away, and if changed, would be "repaired" automatically, making them near impossible to use...but they weren't removed. An interesting side effect was that autoexec.bat and config.sys were still generated - but were blank. The system still needed them to exist. If you edited them, they would be blanked out again.

The next issue was bloated software. The OS itself was still basically Windows 98, however many of the applications that came with Windows were replaced with new versions. Previously, Windows required I believe a Pentium 90. With Me, that suddenly jumped to a Pentium 350 minimum. Recommended was higher. Odd part being that the OS itself wasn't that different, with two exceptions. The first reason for the jump was the software being pointlessly bloated. Biggest example was Media Player, which now boasted features such as skins, and provided the same (actually fewer) functions as before, but requiring more RAM and CPU to load. Apps like CDPLAYER were replaced with placeholders that simply launched Media Player. If you upgraded, your familiar apps would be slower, do less, and were kind of tacky. You really needed a newer computer to handle them. One reason was competition from software such as RealPlayer, which in the late 90s was a major competitor to WMP. MS had a strategy of integrating free alternatives to competing software into the OS (like IE to crush Netscape, MSNMess against ICQ and AIM, etc). Real and WMP were fighting to see who could be slower and more bloated at the time. MS' strategy ultimately won out, nobody talks about RealNetworks anymore. (Tragically, WINAMP was better than either, and could run on a potato.)

There was a change to the driver system, I don't recall too much there, but for the most part drivers still worked. Any time they change Windows, some old drivers always break, and people always get furious. Changing how drivers worked caused a lot of problems, which as usual, would be fixed with driver updates - though even that was impacted by the confusion with 2000 as to which version to update. Me's unpopularity and the arrival of XP meant a lot of drivers probably never got made. Obviously, hardware without drivers, or broken drivers, is going to wreak havoc on your computer, resulting in many complaints about Me.

But the real culprit of Me's disaster was a little thing called PCHealth. Or rather, a bunch of things. For XP, MS intended a ton of new system tools to simplify or automate maintenance, for instance, System Restore. I feel Me was used as a prototype for these features - which were not quite ready for deployment. The OS would always be looking for changes, making backups, rewriting files it didn't like, monitoring everything - and it was bad at its job. My favorite glitch was when I played a DOS game which Windows decided was an important program, and tracked every single change it made. It would make backups constantly. After an hour or two, the game would be unplayable - often before that, I'd get a warning about low disk space, because every single action the software did that wrote to disk would result in backups - now this game which was a few KB was taking about 2 GB of space. This was a glitch in System Restore, which didn't work anyway. I don't recall ever once having a successful restore on Me, it always messed up. To this day, I don't trust SR because of it. Once again, PCHealth would undo any attempts to make the OS work properly - its job was ensure the OS stayed broken, and used a lot of resources to make that happen. This is where the slowdowns and crashes likely came from, the combination of bloated features, an automated maintenance system that didn't work, and bad drivers.

I had an altered version, which did two things - unlocked DOS, and removed PCHealth from the system. I wish I remembered the details on it, but it's been over 20 years. With PCHealth removed, many but not all of the automatic things stopped, and the system was more responsive. For the applications, I cracked open the CAB files on a 98 disc and copied the old versions back over - most of the time it worked (but you had to be careful not to trigger Me's repairs, which would restore the broken software - you could never open Media Player, perhaps giving a hint as to what it was doing that made it so slow to load).

After restoring DOS, removing PCHealth and System Restore and such, and restoring the features of 98se, and had the right drivers for everything, doing a clean install rather than an upgrade, what I had seemed like a smooth, more stable version of Windows 98. The potential was there. It could have been the best version of 9x, but I believe was really just trying to push people toward upgrading to XP by making 9x look more outdated than it was. Releasing broken software to push you to new software was also in MS' playbook, as was inflating system requirements to force upgrades. They still do this kind of thing today.