Branden :
v3.1=windows 3.1 (good)
v4.0=windows 95 (problems)
v4.1=windows 98 (good)
v4.9=windows me (wretched)
v5.0=windows 2k (problems)
v5.1=windows xp (good)
v5.2=windows xp-x64 (problems)
v6.0=windows vista (problems)
v6.1=windows 7 (good)
v6.2=windows 8 (problems?)
the way i see it is every x.0 version is 'revolutionary' and 'innovative' but has problems, by version x.1 the kinks are ironed out and we end up with an O/S everyone likes, if they push their luck any further they're just tinkering with something that ain't broke and end up breaking it.
so... the way i see it is it doesn't matter if windows 9/blue is v6.3 or v7.0 it'll probably suck.
EDIT: i've used every O/S mentioned. i'm not saying windows 95/2k/vista totally sucked, but being systems that introduced new features/funtionality they were problematic (more so than their predecessors), whereas windows 98/xp/7 were the most stable systems released to date (at the time). and it seems that windows me/xp-64/8 simply took their respective preceeding & reliable O/S and tweaked it to the point of de-stabalising them again. i love(d) windows 95/98/2k/xp/xp-64/vista/7 in spite of flaws they had, but it's 98/xp/7 that i stuck with long term. i don't forsee dropping 7 to upgrade to 8 and, if the pattern i see holds true, i don't predict commiting to 9/blue over 7 either because it won't be a x.1 version.
Um... 95, 98 and ME have nothing to do with modern windows as the product line ended with winME.
It goes more like this:
win pre 3.1
... ya, nobody heard about it for a reason
win 3.1
innovative, relatively stable, but still rough (especially compared to mac OS at the time), generally a pretty front end for DOS
WinNT (win3.x-win4.x)
generally sucked through the whole product line, but offered better support than competitors (Linux and OSx). This was also the only MS non-server OS that offered builds for various CPU architectures (until win8 which now has a stripped down ARM version, which is not exactly the same idea)
Win2K (win5)
awesome, but prone to security issues (I loved it way better than XP until SP2). First OS where a program crash did not (always) mean that you would have to reset the computer!
WinXP (win5.2)
At release people did not like it because it was resource heavy and the interface was 'cartooney', but hardware caught up fairly quickly, and some early patches made things run smoother. As it was basically win2K with a new 'friendly' UI it suffered from major security flaws, and could not keep up with the major changes happening with hardware (most notably wireless becoming standard in laptops).
winXP SP2 (Win5.5ish? they dropped the 5.x lingo with SP1)
While the UI stayed the same, the entire kernel was basically given an overhaul, redesigning the way things worked to finally shut down most of the security flaws, and making winXP the thing that everyone loves to this very day. A major push by MS finally made driver development and digital signing much more important which made 3rd party security issues much smaller as well. It was the development of SP2 that finally made MS software engineers realize that they had no idea of how Windows actually worked, which prompted the MinWin project. MinWin would eventually define the kernel, and segregated the OS into very distinct and separate parts (kernel, drivers, interface, etc) that we have today. This MinWin project is what we have to thank for the core stability and security found in Vista, 7, and 8, and has allowed MS to develop the different parts of the OS separately with minimal fear of different dev teams changing things which would then screw up another teams product cycle.
-Note XP 64bit was a port of sorts, and not an entirely new OS, and certainly not a new revision as it ran parallel in development to regular XP. Instead it was just a flavor of XP similar to MCE. The OS itself was just as stable as XP, but hardware manufacturers had a rough learning curve on writing drivers for 64bit (which continued through the first few years of Vista).
Win Vista (win6)
solid OS, but terrible 3rd party driver support (especially for the 64bit version), and generally a resource hog for what was available at the time (needing 1-2GB of ram to run smoothly when 512MB was considered a lot, and Ram was crazy expensive at the time), but things got much better over time. Running it on a machine now you would never have guessed the hell it put people through during the first year or so of it's release.
Win7
solid from RP onwards (RC1 and 2 had some issues), a little ram heavy but otherwise it was the first windows to require less hardware than it's predecessor for the CPU and GPU. It will go down in history as the first popular windows OS to have a good dev cycle, release cycle, and life cycle.
Win8
solid from first beta, great new features making what use to take 3rd party mods now part of the OS, great backwards compatibility, very small footprint and hardware requirements, in all respects the best OS ever made by MS, but because the UI has evolved past 1995 (17 years ago!) it is bound to have a terrible release with a long educational cycle like win95 had when the start menu was introduced. Other than the Ram and screen resolution requirements, this is now that 2nd OS to be released that uses less hardware than its predecessor.
In the alternate bizaro world you had a separate consumer product line which was (very) loosely based upon win3.1 development, and by the end had absolutely nothing to do with the business winNT platform which carried on the win3.1 kernel development:
win95
sucked. It had a new interface that NOBODY liked at the time, it was unstable, it had terrible driver and hardware support, terrible resource handling, and it still ran on top of DOS while stripping out all of it's usefulness
win98
sucked less. The OS was relatively stable (provided you had 'modern' hardware), 3rd parties figured out how to write a proper drivers and software, and it finally did not rely on DOS
win98SE
Was awesome and the only 'good' OS of this product line! Sadly nobody used it, but it was rock stable, had great driver support, was secure (well... secure for it's day), and was perhaps the best all-around release through its entire product cycle we would see until win7, having even less hiccups through its lifetime (all be it a short lifetime) than XP
winME
It was an attempt to bring the consumer OS more in line with the winNT/2K product line in an attempt to bring cross-platform compatibility. What they ended up with was a mess of code that simply did not work unless you were running hardware that was specifically designed for it. This was the only version of Windows (other than v1 and 2) that I never used as a daily-driver, and the few times I did have to interact with it were painful. There is good reason it was the end of the product line.
So really the list goes like this:
win1&2: had no idea what they were doing
win3.1: Usable but behind the times, turned to crap with NT release
win4: crap
win5: rough beginnings with win2K, but by XP SP2 it was awesome
win6: extremely rough beginnings, but by SP1 it was usable
win7: awesome
win8: awesomer, but not everyone's cup of tea
saying that they have an every-other good release cycle is just silly. If anything, they typically always have a rough start, and get better as it goes
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