MinWin has re-emerged as a source of debate since Microsoft last week released a few more details regarding Windows 7. Previous discussion of the “MinWin” kernel by engineers related to the Windows 7 team would have led one to believe that MinWin was a fancy new kernel that would be released with Windows 7. Steven Sinofsky, a man well positioned to know what he is talking about, explained that we already have MinWin, as MinWin is little more than a stripped down version of the Vista kernel, one that is shared with Server 2008 and which will be improved in Windows 7 timeframes.

The status of MinWin in Microsoft’s desktop and server products, however, is not the key reason people are so interested in the existence of a stripped-down Windows kernel (though it certainly matters, as it might hint at new levels of modularity). Rather, the interest in MinWin rests more on a realization that more and more embedded devices will share our lives in the future, causing desktop and servers to shrink as a percentage of the daily computing pie (though just as a percentage; it’s not so much that we will use desktops and servers less, but that we will use a lot more embedded devices).