Cutler is a nerd-hero of mine.

Yeah, the NT kernel design is pretty frickin awesome. There is a great book about the run up to NT's release. He took on the job because he thought that writing operating systems would happen fewer and fewer times in the future. I think he actually said that he thought this might be one of the last times a commercial OS would be written from scratch.

The thing about operating systems is that everyone thinks they know everything there is to know, but wow are they off the mark.