XP had a bad start due to relative slowness on the hardware on release (just like Vista).
But as you said, from sp2 days on it was rock solid and reliable. And since everyone skipped Vista, and a notable amount of people even 7, it was "here to stay". While any previous version of Windows was replaced within 2 to 4 years, many used XP for close to a decade. Some grew up on this OS.
When 7 came along it was a welcome evolution of Windows without breaking too many workflows that relied on muscle memory, for better or for worse.
8 was a clusterduck just like Vista, but for different reasons. Vista fell behind schedule and was unpolished and also, Microsoft overestimated the advancements in hardware power that would be made during its development time. With 8 the problem was that Microsoft went "all in" with conquering the mobile market. The ambitious idea of creating a unified user experience on every platform, while designing every thing as mobile first and then just slamming it onto Windows on the desktop. Obviously they didn't nail this first try, and although Windows phone 8.1 was a really solid user experience we know how this ended. So the primary reason why this modern UI was conceived was eventually gone, but by the time the decision to scrap Windows mobile was made, it was already on the desktop, but at least now you can make changes to the UI without thinking about phones. (just tablets and game consoles...)
With 10 they're still to this day working on creating a consistent modern UX on desktop. I'm still highly skeptical whether that was the right thing to do at all. Considering the current trend everything seems to be eventually web based, and those couple business use cases probably wouldn't care if Windows 10 still looked like XP.
And that all didn't even address the couple major duckups they introduced with updates. Older Windows had its problems, but that's a whole new dimension here. Some ex Microsoft employee claimed on his YouTube channel that Microsoft massively scaled down their own QA. Wouldn't be too surprised if that was the case.
But as you said, from sp2 days on it was rock solid and reliable. And since everyone skipped Vista, and a notable amount of people even 7, it was "here to stay". While any previous version of Windows was replaced within 2 to 4 years, many used XP for close to a decade. Some grew up on this OS.
When 7 came along it was a welcome evolution of Windows without breaking too many workflows that relied on muscle memory, for better or for worse.
8 was a clusterduck just like Vista, but for different reasons. Vista fell behind schedule and was unpolished and also, Microsoft overestimated the advancements in hardware power that would be made during its development time. With 8 the problem was that Microsoft went "all in" with conquering the mobile market. The ambitious idea of creating a unified user experience on every platform, while designing every thing as mobile first and then just slamming it onto Windows on the desktop. Obviously they didn't nail this first try, and although Windows phone 8.1 was a really solid user experience we know how this ended. So the primary reason why this modern UI was conceived was eventually gone, but by the time the decision to scrap Windows mobile was made, it was already on the desktop, but at least now you can make changes to the UI without thinking about phones. (just tablets and game consoles...)
With 10 they're still to this day working on creating a consistent modern UX on desktop. I'm still highly skeptical whether that was the right thing to do at all. Considering the current trend everything seems to be eventually web based, and those couple business use cases probably wouldn't care if Windows 10 still looked like XP.
And that all didn't even address the couple major duckups they introduced with updates. Older Windows had its problems, but that's a whole new dimension here. Some ex Microsoft employee claimed on his YouTube channel that Microsoft massively scaled down their own QA. Wouldn't be too surprised if that was the case.