Win98 was Fail, the best OS before Win7 was XP and that is a proven fact by its longeivity and the fact that millions of people still use it, how many people still use Win98 or did 5 years after? 98 was buggy as hell, not as buggy as ME, XP was fantastic to say that it was still selling 9 years after it's first release, no other OS can claim that feat
Actually, Win98 was remarkably stable, compared to Win95, Win Me and WinXP. It can't be compared, in terms of memory usage, 'always on' performance, etc. But it was good, in retrospect, for its time. Win98SE was very good. Patched up Win98 was pretty good. I used Win98 on my old Pentium II laptop for 8 years with no catastrophic problems (in combination with the contemporaneous Norton Utilities); and it still runs just fine.
To say that XP was 'fantastic' because it sold a lot and is still installed on a lot of systems is absolute empty-headed nonsense. That's not a basis for something being 'good'; it's mainly because of the usage of software (no longer updated) written for XP and used by businesses, and because there are just a lot of old computers out there still being run by users.
Computer operating system sales numbers and installed base numbers have almost nothing to do with the 'quality' of the operating system. No one on this site can refute that with their personal experience, since they are part of a miniscule customer sub-market in comparison to the rest of the world of installed operating system users.