Andy Tanenbaum hasn't learned anything

17 years later:<p>Plan9 is going nowhere. That commercial spin off Vita Nuovo (<a href="http://www.vitanuova.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.vitanuova.com/</a>) is quiet. The Linux and Solaris monolithic kernels are still strong.<p>Minix3 doesn't really progress (<a href="http://groups.google.com/group/minix3" rel="nofollow">http://groups.google.com/group/minix3</a>). The L4 microkernel is commercially successful (<a href="http://www.ok-labs.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ok-labs.com/</a>).

I hate hardware.<p>Hardware is the thing that prevents microkernels with carefully distributed functions.<p>But hardware is still land where dragons are, therefore you have to do everything with it in kernel-space (it's unsafe and isn't delegatable mostly).<p>If hardware would soon die and we'd be programming on the turing machine, we'd get microkernel OSes in no time!

"Name a product that succeeds by running UNIX as an application." Hmhm, Xen? I think I'd name quite a few.