The kernel is better than ever. As for the shell, it's always had junk on it for commercial reasons - remember MSN and baking IE into the OS, or how the system requirements were ridiculously low for the reasons of marketing and to placate OEM manufacturers? And how OEMs were allowed to add loads of junk software on computers wearing their "Designed for Windows" stickers?
I'm pretty sure XP came with a digital app store right at the top of the redesigned Start menu, Windows Media Player had ten music stores integrated all selling DRM'd WMA files...
The system requirements especially, must have created a lot of work right down into the kernel team.
NT 3.x, 4.0 and 5.0 (2000) which the presentation are about were, at least, quite free from commercial junk. It was only when consumer and professional Windows merged into one with XP that the enshittification started -- but that being said, it's bad on an entirely different level now. It's easy to look back longingly at the days of XP and 7 now that Windows is so overwhelmingly user hostile.
Like, rhetorical dude from 2002, you're mad that Windows XP will not let you remove Internet Explorer easily and that it requires online or phone activation to work? Let me tell you about Windows 11...
> Windows Media Player had ten music stores integrated all selling DRM'd WMA files...
Apologies. This was me. Pretty much all 10. Most of them were just white-labels of the same code. Believe me, I hated doing it. MS didn't want to do the right thing and vertically-integrate everything like Apple was doing, which was the better solution as then you owned the entire user experience from end-to-end.
Yes I could tell they were white label. One supermarket chain in the UK was offering everything from pet insurance and funeral insurance to phone plans and digital music. The way it was listed in the interface among so many other random brands was hilarious to me.
Well they got slapped for including IE forcible by the EU and there was never an App Store like that over XPs lifetime to my knowledge?
Also you could quite easily replace the whole Shell. Sadly not anymore if you do that now stuff you need access to will just stop working because everything "metro" will need the explorer shell actively running in the background.
Windows Catalog (which I totally don't rememeber at all... was it in all the builds or only some regions??) was apparently "the showcase for products that are designed to make optimum use of Windows XP. Go digital, and discover a great new computing experience!" [1][2] More of a catalog listing software and hardware that got the designed for XP logo, rather than a place to buy those things, let alone an app store experience. At that time, it was much more common to purchase applications inside an actual store.
I'm pretty sure XP came with a digital app store right at the top of the redesigned Start menu, Windows Media Player had ten music stores integrated all selling DRM'd WMA files...
The system requirements especially, must have created a lot of work right down into the kernel team.