Microsoft, after much R&D work, deployed two technologies in Windows 7 that improved the security situation considerably. The first was the Static Driver Verifier.[1] That's the formal proof-of-correctness system that checks the source code for a driver for termination, bad pointers, incorrect API calls, and anything that could result in a kernel crash. It's a symbolic path tracer - it symbolically executes all paths through the code. All drivers must pass that verifier. Before this was deployed, about half of Windows crashes were due to drivers. Now, very few are.

The other technology was a classifier for panic dumps. When Windows crashes and reports data to Microsoft, that data goes into a classifier system which tries to cluster similar crashes together. So, when there's a crash bug, the reports of similar crashes are all looked at by the same person at the same time, which tends to get it fixed.

Linux lacks either technology, which is a problem.

[1] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff...