Had to do that today. It was retarded how a motherboard from 2003 was asking for a windows boot floppy to be able to flash the bios. That motherboard is from back in the day of course. But it seems to me that bios flashing using a more modern method was slow on the uptake for motherboard manufacturers.
During a time when the floppy was being phased out because no one was really using it anymore like they use to since the advent of thumb drive and burnable media, and you still found motherboard manufacturers requiring a windows98/me boot disk to flash your bios when everyone's using xp (of course not everyone did, but xp didn't require boot floppies, and a lot of people had xp).
Bootable thumb drives, bootable cd's and dvd's, and still being asked for a windows 98/me boot floppy. A motherboard from 2003 asking for a windows boot floppy i can let that slide (but i'm still not happy). The worst i've had was a biostar motherboard from 2006 that was only able to have the bios flashed with nothing but a floppy (at least the only requirement to flash a bios that didn't require a tie to needing windows in some fashion). I couldn't let that slide, but i had to do it anyway back then.
The alternative to flashing with a windows boot floppy would be using a cd, dvd, or thumb drive. And most preferable to flash the bios by going to the bios to do it (at least the biostar motherboard had this). Or if motherboard manufacturers could make their own bootable bios flashing utilities. I could see them making mini bootable linux live cd's for this purpose, or something more proprietary. It can be either as long as it's host operating system dependless, and storage type flexibility. I don't care if a motherboard manufacturer makes a deal with microsoft for something bootable to get their stuff done. As long as it's not a goddamned floppy disk, doesn't cost extra money (cost for the bootable flash utility would be included in the price of the motherboard if microsoft based), and doesn't involve me doing more than burning an image, or extracting to a thumb drive, and restarting the computer. Then waiting for flash utility to boot, or go into bios and start the process.
There are some things that need to be said. Everyone's sort of lucky windows boot floppies can be converted to iso's, because people are sort of ****ed when there's no floppies or floppy drives. Granted i haven't flashed a modern day motherboard, but i find in 2006 requiring a floppy to flash a bios is slow on the uptake for easier methods.