SirPrimalform: Well I suppose Windows 2000 was never a home OS so it's excused anyway. The 'home' version of Windows prior to XP was ME. :D
What are you comparing 95 to though? Sure it was bad compared to later 'good' editions of Windows but it was a massive upgrade from 3.1x.
EDIT: I should probably say, I wasn't meaning to start a serious discussion of the merits of different historical versions of windows, but rather trying to construct a jokey theory based on the Star Trek odd/even thing.
Yeah... it was not *that* massive. Most of the games that came out in that time were still running in DOS and Windows acted like a shell, very much like Win 3.x before it.
It came with the promise with plug & play but all it managed to do was coin the expression "plug and pray" because that was where things were at the time.
It was a cheap imitation of MacOS. A knock-off with much hype and marketing behind it.It also benefited from the fact that MS was willing to license it to any HW builder of IBM PC clones where Apple kept MacOS to themselves.
The mystification of the MS one good, one bad cycle is just that, a mystification. The NT versions of Windows were generally good, proper operating systems, the "consumer" ones like 95, 98 and Me were utter crap.