So you mean "Microsoft developed Windows to be good" like OP said.

XP was the response to Linux. Before that, windows was a crash fest, remember 98, or Millennium?

Linux was rock stable, so microsoft had to do something and started yo use their server core in the home version of windows.

They just realized trying to maintain NT and 9x core was foolish. Trying to put the hardware abstraction layer from Windows 2000 (NT 5) into 9x for Millennium Edition was AWFUL. So they scrapped the entire idea of a separate home core, 9x died, and Windows XP (NT 5.1) was born.

But NT was already good. Windows 2000 SP4 was a fantastic OS for its time, as was XP.

Gotta remember that the 9x core versions (95, 98, ME) were (in some ways) practically a separate OS masquerading as Windows.

I barely remember using win98, it was the first OS I used when I was very little. But I don't remember it being so prone to crashing. At least not fatally crashing. Of course, by the time I was just playing around with paint and shareware games, not doing any serious work, so I wouldn't know if it was bad.

But that still means it isn't as straightforward as "windows was always bad, linux was always good".