It has the lowest demands on both hardware and users. It is suitable for everyone – unlike Vista, which pops up its stupid help prompts at every turn. It is easy to customize. It is well polished, and there are plenty of tools for it. Developers have grown so used to its libraries that they don’t want to leave it, so it enjoys extreme software support.
It still holds more than half of the market, even though Microsoft is pushing Vista hard. The Security Center can be easily disabled. It runs even on very weak machines, which makes it a good fit for netbooks and lets it compete with Linux distributions.
It combines Windows 2000 and Windows Me, which means work and play. It never crashes thanks to the NT kernel. It is the most widely used corporate system, which guarantees it will stay that way for a long time. It has more fan clubs than Vista. It has more skins than Vista.