[iforgotpassword]

Huh, 98SE was the sweet spot in the 9x series.

Fwiw, the NT kernel was designed for portability from the ground up. During initial development they targeted x86 and the i680 and it has been ported to pretty much any CPU that had relevance over time. Itanium, Alpha, ARM and.... PowerPC. While that branch is probably not maintained currently it would be pretty easy for Microsoft to get that going again.

[Porthos9K]

I'm still hoping they'll do the smart thing and fork FreeBSD. Why EEE Linux when there's a perfectly good Unix with a business-friendly license?

[IntelMiner]

Because they don't have to EEE Linux

If you want to run Linux in the cloud, you've got a bunch of providers (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc)

Microsoft simply wants to be in that market, so they'll offer the same products their competition does. Anything they can do to make Linux better on Azure is considered a net gain for them