And as a side-note ...
There is a fly in the ointment.
The fly's name is Dave Cutler. As long as Dave's in charge of OS development at Microsoft, Microsoft will *not* do anything UNIXish ... Dave hates the entire un*x model.
Dave's work at DEC was nothing short of brilliant, given the hardware resources available to him at the time ... but I suspect MS has him locked in for life, contractually speaking. It's the only reason I can see that he still works for Redmond, anyway. It's really sad to see a true visionary stifled. Not that I know anything, you understand.
Whatever happened to "Barrelfish", anyway ;-)