WindowsME was a band-aid. It wasn't meant to exist. Windows2K was supposed to be the release that merged the Win9x and WinNT worlds. It didn't end up working, s

WindowsME was a band-aid. It wasn't meant to exist. Windows2K was supposed to be the release that merged the Win9x and WinNT worlds. It didn't end up working, so Windows2000 was released as the next version of the WindowsNT line (WinNT 5.0) and Windows XP (WinNT 5.1) did what it was supposed to do. There are probably some parallels to Longhorn/Vista. Except it seems like with Vista Microsoft bit off a lot more than they could chew, and had to massively scale things back for release.