Iain McDonald, General Manager, Windows Server Group: I had a bunch of people internally ask me why Windows Server shows it's version as Windows Server 2008 SP1 (for brevity - WS08). [...] The history here goes back to problems we had from the split we had when we broke Windows XP from Windows Server 2003 (WS03) way back in 2000.

At the time we had Windows 2000 (Win2k) out in the market & it was being very well received. Especially on the client side which was doing well with corporate desktops. At the same time in the consumer side, we had Windows ME. I never worked on WinME, I have never installed it, & I know nothing about it except what people have told me. <I removed what i really think. If you meet me, feel free to ask>.

Mid 2000, we had a combined release on the rails but the pressure to do a client release for consumer got high. So we forked WinXP from what was to become WS03. On one side, I think we did exactly the right thing. We met the dates required from OEMs for WinXP & closed down the server release in exactly the right way. I believe the longevity of WS03 in market was because we did a load of right things in the end game. I sill think what we knew when we released WinXP in august 2001 it was a great product. It's just that the world changed 2 weeks later...