When did Windows peak?

When Windows peaked depends a lot on what you want to get out of the OS, and when you began using it.

Before Windows 95, the OS was really just an interface overlay over DOS. It was 16 bit with a great deal of limitations. You want to use elaborate peripherals? HA! Hope you like to spend some serious time installing drivers and working out the kinks. With the arrival of Win95, the era of 32 bit Windows and being the whole environment of working with your computer began. USB was bringing us a wide world of hardware you could attach to do more than type stuff in and see things on a screen. That grew with Windows 98, and the refinement of Windows 98 Second Edition. Despite all of this capability, Windows 9x, as it would become known, was simple. It was also fairly easily modified, albeit through mostly fairly hacky means. So, with Win98SE, a fair number of people would see it as the peak of Windows. The era of 9x was the explosion of widespread computing, as a part of our daily lives. It was also the dawn of the internet era, but that would bring us into another new territory that would see 9x falter as the platform of the future.

When the internet became a key part, and eventually the near entirety of reason you'd have and use a computer, Windows had to change. Security became critical, and robust connectivity became paramount. Microsoft's NT (New Technology) based operating systems had been built with much more of that security and robustness in mind. The first version of NT based Windows truly meant for the masses to use was Windows 2000 Professional. Still fairly customizable, it was everything 9x had been, with the benefit of real security. What it didn't have was a look that was modern, nor enough of the ease of use capability users had come to want, nor the multimedia and gaming features people wanted. Windows XP brought that to the table. It even was meant to offer UI mod support officially, although that never materialized. That didn't stop the community from working around it and opening it up for serious customization. The default UI and behaviors were not ideal, and as usual Microsoft tried to make them better, but broke the system in the process, giving us Windows Vista. What was broken was fixed in Windows 7, which basically became the most popular version of Windows ever - not because it had the most users ever, but because it had the most fans ever. This is why a great many, and possibly the majority of Windows users are likely to call Windows 7 the peak. However, being so visually ornate and stylized, it was prone to becoming dated, and sure enough the UI became so in the eyes of the youngest and most trendy users - the people Microsoft knew would be the customers of tomorrow.

That brought us to the 'Metro' era of Windows. Beyond the look, though, was the strong influence of mobile devices. People's first line computing device stopped being a desktop or laptop, and became the cell phone they carried around. We didn't call software 'programs' anymore, we call them 'apps'. We got used to a touchscreen as the main means of interaction, so MS tried to make that a central feature of Windows - except the OS never really worked well on handheld mobile devices. We got Windows 8, which turned the UI and overall methods of interaction with Windows on their head, and like a kid with a full stomach being tossed around, it puked a nasty experience on us and we all hated it. Microsoft had to backpedal with 8.1, giving us back the Start Menu that had been the main bridge between all the functions of the OS. We were given a real computer 'desktop' experience back with Windows 10. For anyone that endured that dip into trying to be something Windows was not, Win10 could be the peak of Windows.

Me personally, I miss the simplicity of 9x, but appreciate the really powerful abilities of early consumer NT (the world of NT3.1-4 was a whole different adventure). If Windows had a peak, it was to me somewhere between Win98SE and XP, but neither Windows 2000 Pro nor WinME lived up to what should have been the ultimate synthesis of the OS.