>That is a shorter cycle than Visual Studio 6.0 to 7.0 will enjoy.

VS.NET has taken quite a while to get out, just cause of teh whole .Net Shift. I think one of the PMs said that during the project, there is at elast one person who had to take maternity leave twice.

>I've looked at both Win2K and WinMe as transitional OSes.

Well, even after 2000, MS was working on two OSes, Odysee (Next Windows 2000) and Neptune (Next Windows ME), then they decided, "Screw this, lets work on one code base" and thats what Whistler is. I thik they've been saying that "one code base" thing since NT3.51, but they finally got around to doing it. AFAIK.