[turndown]

> 1998 - 2009 was a tough time to be a Windows user

Is that true? I was too young to really have an opinion but to me most people cite XP and especially Windows 7(ignoring Vista which was bad) as the height of Windows. Of course outside of Windows, like mobile, it really was bad but if we’re just talking Windows then I can’t help but disagree.

[bunderbunder]

XP had a very, very long run, and I think that people tend to mostly remember the time period when Vista was out but they were sticking to XP, which had stabilized pretty well by then. Recency bias and all that. Also, at this point it's easy to just be nostalgic for when Microsoft regarded Windows as an operating system rather than a vehicle for delivering advertisements to a captive audience.

The initial rollout, though, was frustrating for users who were beset by hardware and software compatibility issues, confused by a significantly altered user interface, and still experiencing the blue screens they had been told that XP would banish.

[actuallyalys]

I was a bit young to have an opinion myself but in the early part of that, you had Windows 98, which had a pretty solid reputation, and Windows XP, whose brought the stability of NT to home users. Windows ME was poorly received but it wasn’t on the market for long before Windows XP came out.

[anticorporate]

Yeah, I think the decline of the Windows platform came a little later. Windows Me and Vista were crap, but 98SE was perfectly usable until XP came out, and XP was usable until 7 arrived. But, OS X and the Linux desktop made huge advances during that time period, vastly increasing the number of business software and gaming titles that would run well, so that by the 2010s, switching operating systems became a lot more viable for a lot more people. Especially with the rise of web-based applications in that time period, meaning many home users were no longer locked into a desktop client for things like email and office software.