Quote Originally Posted by james View Post
To make a long story short. MS has never restructured the core elements of any of their operating systems to comply with the security found on a UNIX system. Every OS they have ever sold is still for the "Personal Computer" concept.

The closest they ever came was with OS/2. Yes. Microsoft created OS/2. IBM bought it from them. Shortly after it was sold, Microsoft rushed Windows 95 to market to crush it. OS/2 is pretty awesome stuff. It can fit right in with all of the other UNIX like systems. Microsft learned a lot from the development of that system. They could see their own undoing within it.

That's the point.

Microsoft has found that the only way they can maintain their place at the top is to be different and not-quite-compatible with the rest of the entire world of computer science.

If they would restructure their way of doing things to be UNIX like, then no one would be stuck using them, because there are so many better UNIX like computer systems out there.
Wait, you're making a bit of a train of thought error here.

OS/2 was pretty much the predecessor of a lot of things that went into Windows NT. Unlike MS-DOS, Windows 3.11, Win95 or Win98, Windows NT was a lot more secure and had a kernel and feature set that was comparable to UNIX.

NT is pretty much the only Windows operating system that's still in production environments today. NT4 was superseded by Windows NT5.0 (a.k.a Windows 2000), then NT5.1 (which we know as Windows XP), NT6.0 (Vista) and the current release being Windows NT6.1, or Windows 7.

From NT5 onward, the Windows kernel is completely POSIX compliant and has all the familiar security features. The only thing needed is a set of tools for some programs to run properly, which Microsoft supplies to system administrators.

Running code in kernel mode requires privilige escalation in NT just as it would in a Unix system, the only difference was, up to Windows XP, every user had privilege escalation enabled by default. (Essentially, all programs were run as 'sudo' without any questions asked), a major problem which was fixed in Vista and Windows 7.

With proper policy enforcement though, even NT4 systems were (and still are, in most cases) as secure as a Unix box.