Remember, I was there during the rush to get 2k out the door - before it was called Win2k.

There WAS very much an attitude of "let's tie everything together before they make us tear it apart" - along with the associated idea that the more difficult they made it to dissassemble things, the less likely it is that they would make Microsoft do it.

This philosophy was very evident in the way bugs were handled - a lot of bugs that were caused by IE integration were closed as "won't fix" without any discussion of the merits (usually .dll version dependancy errors) when the solution presented was to remove the integration.