Not quite :) The DOS emulation layer in Windows 32-bit is called VDM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_DOS_machine) - WOW is a technology that allows one bitness apps to run on a different bitness OS. WOW used to let 16-bit Windows apps run on a 32-bit OS (i.e. Win95), and nowadays, WOW64 is a shim layer that allows 32-bit applications to run on a 64-bit OS

If Microsoft could deploy a decent unix on top the NT kernel, that might not be a bad strategy. But the fact remains that there are a wealth of unix tools that you can compile and run on an number of unix variants, but are practically impossible to build and run on Windows without heavy customization. I'm arguing that is eventually going to be a problem for MS because they are forced to invent everything internally and can't really easily incorporate what's going on elsewhere.

There's a POSIX subsystem.

Way back in the day, Microsoft had their own Unix, Xenix. However they did a deal with AT&T to get out of the Unix market - they probably still can't sell a Unix even if they wanted to.

Does anyone know what UNIX even is anymore? Does UNIX=BSD? So does that mean Microsoft could sell Linux, since Linux!=BSD?

So, it's a VMS heritage ;-)

Yep, 1979 vs 1970 for Unix ;-)

I think Unix aged better.

Oh, so that what the WoW in the SysWoW64 folder name means

Yep, the SysWOW64 directory has all the 32-bit DLLs in the system (usually an identical copy to the Win7 32-bit DLLs, though not always), and the System32 folder has the 64-bit binaries. Yes, this is confusing, but not breaking apps was more important