That entire era in Microsoft products, MSVC 6.0, Office 97 and bit later w2k was quite special: linear progress from earlier windows things, but not yet in that

That entire era in Microsoft products, MSVC 6.0, Office 97 and bit later w2k was quite special: linear progress from earlier windows things, but not yet in that cycle of change for the sake of change, that is never really complete so you always get a wild mix (arguably w2k already contained first glimpses of that with its service control panels that felt a little alien to the rest) (ps: change for the sake of change is not quite all that I meant, it's not just that "new UI language every five years", but also those great API revolutions that came independent of looks. Those are certainly far more well-founded than just "for the sake of change", but suffer from coexistence with their predecessors nonetheless. win32 as an evolution of win16 and optionally wrapped in MFC, that might have been error-prone and complicated to write for, but it does have a certain clarity that no successor can claim as long as compatibility remains the product)