Is Windows Vista going to be a repeat of the Windows Me marketing and sales disaster that Microsoft experienced back in 2000? Over the past few weeks I"ve come across a number of articles on tech sites that are putting Windows Vista and Windows Me in the same sentence. Not good. Others are more blatant and are directly comparing Vista to Me. That"s really bad and not the kind of comparison that is going to fuel sales.
Pointing out that you"ve fixed the flaws of the previous version hardly inspires people to part with money a second time around. When Windows Me was released by Microsoft back in 2000 it was a total debacle. The operating system offered the consumer very little in the way of new technology (a new interface that looked like Windows 2000 and features such as System Restore, UPnP and automatic Windows Updates). It was tricky to install, trickier still to get running, buggy, tough to get hardware working, even tougher to get legacy hardware running because Microsoft decided to remove non-PnP drivers from the installation CD, had compatibility issues with software, and quite often it just didn"t want to shut down properly. It truly deserved its #4 spot in "The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time" list. On the plus side ... it didn"t have any form of Product Activation.