Not trying to offend anyone at all but this is a prescription for the symptom not the disease. M$FT marketing would loooove to create WindowsLite. In fact the did it already back in the day -- and the public fell for it. WindowsME/SE/CE anyone? What utter pieces of garbage. The real problem is that they still have a moat (the Microsoft tax) on computer manufacturers which keeps their bloatware everywhere. It's one of the more brilliant things Gates pulled off and it's what allowed Ballmer's incompetence to go (almost) unnoticed for years. The other moat which the author correctly points out is inertia. All of the Microsoft faithful that don't want to learn something new (and I don't blame them -- that's a big letting go and reinvestment). And Apple could very well fall into the same hide-behind-the-moat behavior. It's what MBAs and beancounters gets you -- something Jobs was able to mostly avoid. But if we're being open-eyed about this, let's not put them on too high of a pedestal. I'm not at all saying I know where things are going but I do think it involves a Unix philosophy at the core. I think WSL bought Microsoft valuable time but it's embarrassingly obvious that Win32 has just turned to crap and bloat. The Linux/BSD APIs have their warts too but I'll take those warts any day.