[melted]

You've misunderstood. I'm not talking about bolting on a UNIX-like abomination on the side. I'm saying Microsoft needs to replace Windows userland with UNIX userland, much like Apple did well over a decade ago. That's what Microsoft would need to do for Windows to become a decent dev platform again.

[douche]

It'll never happen. Backwards compatibility is too important for Windows to burn the ships like that. I don't even want to think how many millions of lines of code would need to be rewritten.

[melted]

Backwards compatibility could easily be maintained. .bat/.cmd files could be executed by an interpreter called from this shell. It's just another userland, and compared to Windows userland, a very small one.