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Somewhere in the unmentionable basements of industry, there are virtualized air-gapped XP boxes running mission-critical VBA.

At least as recently as 2014, I was aware of some random Windows 3.1 (yes) machines running in a corporate data center owned by a very recognizable Fortune 500 company. At the time, they were upgrading all their Windows PCs from XP to 7 and this 3.1 box showed up. I confirmed that it was, in fact, real.

Probably more common than you think.

https://www.tomshardware.com/software/windows/ms-dos-and-win...

I think the lineage of "good" MS releases is: Windows XP > Windows 7 > Windows 10

Although for me personally I would add Windows 2000.

True story- when XP was released, all of the people "in the know" (among Windows users) used Win2k.

Nobody wanted to upgrade to XP. It was called the Fisher-Price OS because of the way they made the GUI colorful with oversized icons/shapes and rounded corners everywhere.

The old rule of thumb was that every other version was the good one, so people were naturally skeptical of XP (and after having seen ME, who could blame them). Not sure if that holds anymore, or if there is a good one.