New Amazing Product

Just like the old one only it costs more, works slower and breaks more easily.

The Amazing thing about it is that people will believe the marketroid bafflegab and buy it, even though the old one's clearly better. Something to do with Shifting Standards (see the JargonFile).

example: Windows 95 was Microsoft's NAP back in 1996, because of course it was 'so much better than Windows 3.11 and DOS'. Of course we now know that Windows 95 = Windows 4 + DOS 7 + Marketing and a cool AVI video. These days Windows Me and 2000 are the NAPs because of course they are 'so much better than Windows 95 or NT 4'....

When Windows 95 first came out, it was an NAP. Similarly, Win98 and WinME were NAPs. Windows 2000, however, is no NAP. It is faster and more stable than Win9x, and more user-friendly than NT4. You can say what you want about it vis-a-vis (your favorite non-MS OS here), but it is IMO far and away MS's best OS product to date. -- MikeSmith Even with SP2 and Exchange2K? ... and it's ability to lose sync in networks?

You paid HOW MUCH for Service Pack 2000??

See StaticCling.

Are you implying that Windows 95 isn't much of an improvement over 3.1, with long filename support, 32-bit protected memory support, and a user interface that acknowledges the existence of multitasking? Granted, nothing in it was new in computer science, or for personal computers, but there was a lot of "about damn time they put this in" stuff.

MS's marketing department could hardly be expected to proclaim from the mountain-tops "our new product does stuff Unix has done for the last 25 years"...

Also, the user interface in Windows 95 is a huge, drastic improvement over that in 3.1. Almost as usable as the MacOS. That's not a trivial improvement.