BananaRepublic

Well, some of the companies you mentioned are using the same obvious and/or prior art laden patents as a weapon against their competitors, so that 'sad day' has obviously already happened.

Thanks for the 'easier-to-read' stats! Judging by this it's a good thing that I learnt Python, because my C++ skills seem to be falling out of grace. Hmm... Javascript, maybe it's time to bite the bullet...

Ehh, given how much Kinect relies on the functionality offered by PrimeSense, I'd think it would rather be UNBALANCED to claim it to come from MS Research.

Yes, and like their other MS Research projects it's licenced under the 'Microsoft Research Licence' which means that whatever modifications/enhancements you do to the code can only be used within this academic setting. HOWEVER, Microsoft themselves can use your modifications for whatever purposes they want, like sell them. Sweet deal...

Well, Kinect owes quite alot to PrimeSense so I certainly wouldn't categorize it as a 'MS Research' product.

Ahh, wikipedia. Then, I raise you one, please make sure you read the NT description:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_kernel

It's not really about the 'development effort', it's about the performance. Message passing will always be alot slower than communicating through shared memory. Just like user-space filesystems will always be slower than kernel-space filesystems.

This means that in areas where performance is paramount, the system stability benefits of a microkernel design just isn't worth the loss in speed. In other areas it might be, but as the current OS landscape shows it's not in huge demand. Part of this is obviously that monolithic/hybrid kernels really aren't that prone to crashing (bugs get fixed), which means that in practice these kernel designs offers BOTH performance and stability.

Lolwut? Windows is at best a 'hybrid' kernel, and with that it's probably 95% monolithic and 5% microkernel-istic in it's design. How does that translate to '_generally_ a modified microkernel'?? You need to seriously read up on Monolithic/Hybrid/Microkernels and the differences between kernel and user-space. I'll be waiting.