I had a coworker who was very loud about how most of the perceived instability of Windows was actually kernel panics caused be Creative’s godawful windows drivers.

My counter was that while it’s true that Creative Labs is garbage and so is everyone who works there, that’s doesn’t excuse the fact that Windows’ popularity hinged substantially on a permissive driver model and therefore any crashes of Windows allowed by this decision were equally Microsoft’s responsibility. You don’t get to reap the rewards and disavow the blame for the consequences.