[stg22]

OS/2 would have beaten NT in the consumer and SMB markets.

95 dealt with every weakness of NT in those markets and provided developers, consumers and SMBs with a smooth migration path towards it. It had very good backwards (DOS and 3.11) and forwards (XP) compatibility, reasonable hardware requirements and the ability to boot into DOS (important for gaming and some other applications at the time). It also offered massive advances over 3.11 (proper multi-tasking, the best looking GUI of the time and greatly improved stability) that when combined with the above, pushed user adoption.

Given its design requirements, 95 could never have been as stable as NT, but it was a spectacularly successful interim solution for customers not yet ready for the trade-offs that would have involved.

[avidphantasm]

And I believe Windows NT 4 (which had the Windows 95 UI) was the most stable version of NT for a while, even after Windows 2000 came out. Windows 2000 put the video driver in kernel space, which was faster than NT 4, but the early drivers were not great.

—-EDIT:

I misremembered. It was NT 3.51 that still had the video driver in userspace, NT 4 moved it into the kernel: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT_4.0