Also to respond generally to other posts. I am aware of the the separation between NT and 9x. That was Microsoft's problem and not the customers' problem. They could not force people onto ME and had to actually appeal to customers with XP. Then later on, they could not force people onto Vista and had to actually appeal to customers with 7.
Automatic updates remove the step where they have to appeal to anybody.
And I don't mean to single out MS. I remember having a Mac and switching from some version of OS9 back to 8.6 for some reason (don't recall why, but it doesn't matter because it was my computer so it was my decision). Nowadays people are complaining about Liquid Glass and they cannot rollback their OS on their iDevices.