Page "History of Microsoft Windows" Paragraph 33

Driver support was lacking due to the increased programming difficulty in dealing with NT's superior hardware abstraction model.

This problem plagued the NT line all the way through Windows 2000.

Programmers complained that it was too hard to write drivers for NT, and hardware developers were not going to go through the trouble of developing drivers for a small segment of the market.

Additionally, although allowing for good performance and fuller exploitation of system resources, it was also resource-intensive on limited hardware, and thus was only suitable for larger, more expensive machines.