OSNews

MinWin *is* marketing. Microsoft's marketing and HR teams realized that the perception among college-age developers that Windows is huge, bloated, and unwieldy was driving prospective developers away from the platform. MinWin is an attempt to demonstrate publicly that, although Windows is large and complex, the codebase is more structured and manageable than one might think.

They try to get away with calling MinWin a microkernel, but in reality it's just a logical subset of their existing monolithic NT-based kernel. They managed to split out the source code, make it separately buildable, and jazz it up for demonstration purposes.

I'm sure it was a somewhat useful engineering exercise internally, but it was primarily targeted at people like us here at OSNews. They need to sell us the idea that Windows development is sustainable, that they have a plan to mitigate code complexity and to combat "Brooksian" communications overhead.

It's a belated response to the success of bazaar-style development models such as Linux and KDE. See, our software is made up of parts, too. Vista was a fluke. We can scale. We can hack on this codebase for decades to come. No dead ends here. It's not a mess, we know what we're doing, and we've got it under control.

That's the message that underlies MinWin.