For some reason, I'm reminded of a story that a Windows 95 product manager went to the local Electronics Boutique software store and said "we'll take everything". To test backward compatibility of DOS/Windows 3.x applications. How do you do that? Install, run, debug. Repeat.<p>Windows' ball-and-chain is support of legacy applications and the giant-ball-of-rubberbands called the Win32 API. I'm sure some of the alpha geeks at MSFT would love to build a *nix OS - but they have the legacy of Windows.
28:06:42:12<p>/too obscure?<p>but seriously, who knows? who knows how long they might have already been working on it? who knows when they'll start, or how many resources they'll throw into it? we'll only know when someone tells us.
Impossible to say. Is there any evidence that Microsoft is working on a Unix-based OS? Why would they do that, when they still have a stranglehold on the market with Windows?