It was a wonderful operating system. It provided consumer desktop essentials (Plug & Play, DirectX 7, ACPI power management, Windows Driver Model (WDM), and support for consumer I/O interfaces like USB and Firewire) alongside a modernized UI, all running atop the NT kernel. I was extremely lucky to receive a free copy of Windows 2000 Pro as a student, because I rode that horse for years.
Then Microsoft added a green start button and dark blue backgrounds and packaged Win2k for home users as Windows XP.
Windows ME on the other hand...
Other people ran Windows XP, but Cutler was still in charge of Server 2003 before moving on to special projects like creating 64 bit Windows and Microsoft Azure.
His attitude towards the eradication of known bugs really led to Windows feeling rock solid, with the exception of driver bugs (being the leading cause of blue screens).
I used to manage Tru64 (Alpha) and OpenVMS (VAX and Alpha). Mostly Oracle DB and whatever they called their App development suite (horrible, horrible software) for a University's ERP system (called Banner) and infrastructure (Multinet on OpenVMS/VAX for DNS, DHCP, mail, etc). After that I moved on to AIX on Power5 for Oracle on HACMP and Veritas Cluster. Such a different world from what we have now.
I have an old AlphaServer ES47 running OpenVMS and Power5 560Q running AIX in my garage
I forget that what I miss was not the system, but the community on the system. Solo VMS is a lonely experience.
the only dec hardware I ever touched that ran windows was an AlphaServer 1000, and my assignment was to get it back to running VMS. though, I'll admit now, i goldbricked a bit and spent some time trying out Digital UNIX first.
Microsoft continued to use 2000 on Alpha to work out bugs in 64bit support since it was the only 64bit platform they had supported that had operational hardware (support for PPC was only for 32bit), making it important bit in support of Itanium and soon later amd64 ports.
Some of the details made for Alpha support (including extended support for software like FX!32) are now backbone of x86-on-ARM support in windows ARM builds
We also had a bunch of 1000 and 1000a's, and an AlphaStation running AltaVista firewall all on NT.
An ALR 6x6 (6* Pentium Pros) was faster for Windows than the fully loaded out AS4100 IIRC. Except that the 4100 supported more memory and PCI slots IIRC.
I worked at a mostly DEC shop for a while. They had transitioned their main product from VAX to Alpha. Most of the systems ran Digital Unix and VMS, but there was an AlphaServer with NT 4.