I was exchanging e-mail recently with my friend Mike Class, SJ, who is associate dean of the Graduate School at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Mike, who is a Jesuit priest and therefore naturally drawn to the whole idea of conversion, wants Microsoft to build its next version of Windows on top of Linux. And you know, it actually makes some sense!
The idea of Windows as an operating system is purely a product of the Microsoft marketing department, and not some law of nature. When Windows 1.0 appeared, it was a separate program you loaded on top of MS-DOS. Same for Windows 2.0 and 3.0 up through MS-DOS 6.22, the last standalone version of DOS sold by Microsoft. That way, they thought at the time, if Windows ever proved to be a commercial failure (this was far from certain and it is easy to claim Windows WAS a failure before 3.0), it would have been easy for Microsoft to punt back to MS-DOS.
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