It's official: In the home market, Microsoft is planning to migrate away from the Windows 95/98 code base in favor of a "consumerized" future version of Windows NT. A Business Wire report has the details; first some home-type features like games acceleration will be added to Windows NT 5, and then a full-fledged "Windows NT Consumer" will ship after the year 2000.

While this news surprises very few people, it's relevant in that it confirms just how spookily similar Microsoft's and Apple's OS strategies really are. For one thing, the dual-OS strategy for general and high-end/server use is in full effect on both sides of the fence: Microsoft has Windows 95/98 for the general user, and NT for the power user and servers; likewise, Apple has repeatedly talked up the importance of the Mac OS as its general-use OS, while it readies Rhapsody for the folks who need the heavy-duty power. And just as Apple has said that several years from now, Rhapsody will trickle down and supplant the Mac OS as the general-user OS, now Microsoft confirms that it's planning to ditch the ancient and kludgy underpinnings of Windows 95/98 in favor of the much newer, shinier, and stabler kludges that make up Windows NT. Most importantly, both companies seem almost willing to admit that their current general-use operating systems leave a lot to be desired, at least as far as modern OS features go. (So is it that great minds think alike, or is someone being just an eentsy little bit of a copycat?)

While these strategies are very sound and make a lot of sense, we can't help but feel there's something ironically quaint about little Johnny only ever using his NT system to play Quake III, or his mom running Rhapsody to balance her checkbook and send AOL email to Grandma. Creeping featuritis seems to have taken hold in the operating system world, just as it left us an applications world in which probably more than half of the people who use Excel in the workplace only use it to make tables. Oh, it is to laugh...