It's been over twenty years since Windows XP hit the market (shudder), being released to manufacturing in the fall of 2001. Sure, like seemingly every other Windows OS ever released before and after it, it did have its share of stability and usability issues, however, most of these were rectified by Service Pack 2's release in 2004. Due to its at least relative ease of use, Microsoft continued supporting XP for another decade, finally pulling the plug in 2014. Unfortunately though, Microsoft seemingly hasn't had a product of any kind reach the level of critical acclaim and, more importantly, success that XP continues to enjoy today. Here are two less successful MS products released since that, at least I believe, support my theory:

Windows Vista (2006/2007):

The long-awaited successor to XP (some of you may remember it being known as 'Longhorn' during its lengthy development process), Vista hit the market in early 2007. Nearly immediately, Vista users running the OS on anything save for the newest, latest, high-end hardware complained about frequent blue screens, dog-slow performance, and the then new-fangled User Account Control system which significantly and rather ironically restricted users, even those with administrative privileges, from having total control over their systems. And let's not even talk about the dearth of existing software and peripherals that had zero compatibility for Vista, angering users even more! To exacerbate matters even more, Apple was really starting to hit its stride, boosted significantly by the iPod and soon to be the iPhone, announced at Macworld mere weeks before Vista hit store shelves. In conclusion, the failure of Vista basically opened the door for Apple to eat away at Microsoft's dominance in virtually every aspect of the tech world, a trend that continues to this day.

Windows 8/8.1 (2012/2013):

With Microsoft now eating Apple's dust, Microsoft, not to be outdone, tried to come back with Windows 8, released in 2012, and the new 'Metro' design language. Banking on Apple's successes with the iPhone and now the iPad, MS decided to completely redesign the Windows UI to take advantage of touch-screen devices to combat Apple and now Google's lead in that sector. From day one, the touch-screen oriented UI was a complete disaster, especially for the majority of folks who were and still are accustomed to computing with a desktop-oriented OS. This radical departure from previous versions of Windows, as you'd likely imagine, ended up being a massive flop, enabling Apple and to a far larger extent Google (Android) to finally overtake Windows as the world's most widely used operating system on all devices, something that wouldn't even have been imaginable at the time of XP's release.

And that's ignoring even more laughable MS duds since XP's release (think Zune, Windows Phone, etc.)