Windows Millennium was the original announced
shipping name of what became known as
Windows ME; a "cute" shortening of "
Windows Millennium Edition". This subtle difference was a
marketing strategy to give
Windows ME the firm foothold in the
consumer sector as a down-to-earth, "real person"
OS. The name
Windows 2000 had already been
taken by a
previous marketing move to push the
Windows NT kernel as the next home and consumer
operating system. When the some of the
consumer goals of
Windows 2000 looked as if they were not going to be met,
Windows ME had to be
born, both to give
Windows 98 a much needed
technical update, and for
Microsoft to give people a round of
upgrades (something the
market craves).
Millennium
originally started as a
consumer OS project made from cut dream
features off of
Windows 98 (as every project looks at what didn’t make it in
before). The
features that quickly became important were ones based on the
obvious problems that face
Memphis;
registry corruption,
hardware control and
PnP, trying to lessen the amount of
reboots needed, etc. What eventually became very
important was the
notion of
PC Health; the
ability for a
computer to detect symptoms of a generically
complex problem and to take
measures to correct those
problems.
And thus,
PC Health became the new name of the team and the project, taking many lessons from the
NT counterparts. The focus was to study
complex computer problems and to come up with
solutions to solve most of them. There were still remnants of the old
NT vs.
9x rivalry left, but everyone knew that NT was the
victor this time.
Windows 2000 learned a few tricks from
Windows 9x, and
vice versa, but most of all, people knew that the future was going to be
NT.
The
Millennium project strayed away from many items common to the
Win9x line. First off,
Windows ME eventually had a
bar higher than a
486. Previously,
Windows 98 Second Edition needed only a
66 Mhz processor or higher to run (with some RAM and drive space, of course). This was a huge step for the
product (meaning
Pentium optimizations could be
performed, etc), without a good deal of
loss. Many people had turned their 486s into
coffee tables and
routers by now; there was little
market in
legacy PCs.
Windows ME eventually became pitched as an
upgrade OS to many people. With the previous releases, you would see an even mix of
upgrade and "
for PCs without Windows"
packages,
Windows ME took note of the
Windows saturation in the
market, and sold primarily as a (seemingly largely unneeded)
upgrade. Vendors (
OEMs) now ship this on many of their
consumer products, as it is the most recent and largely supported.
Windows Millennium also added a few fairly
obscure API calls (some that not even
Windows 2000 supports), but because of their
narrowness of platform, they are not widely used, if at all.
Millennium eventually became a
small (relatively
speaking)
graveyard project. The focus was to refresh the
consumer OS, patch a bunch of
bugs (as much as possible), toss in the new
PC health features, ship a new
Windows Media Player, a new
Direct X, add some
video editing software to compete with
Apple’s
iMovie, and call it a
release. The team members actually got
jackets saying: "
Millennium: The cleanup crew." Many of the
wondrous plans of one final outing for
Chicago and
crew ended up mostly being rolled into
Windows 2000, and a small upgrade for
Windows 98 SE, which (a year after the release of
ME) holds the majority of the
Windows PC install base.
The glorious
Windows Millennium is
dead, and all that is left is a
hollowed shell we now call
Windows ME. It is soon to be replaced by a
unified (
consumer and
business)
NT offering, with the
compatibility and device support lacking in
Windows 2000, in the form of
Windows XP.