>History matters; the Android codebase is designed to be ported in ways Microsoft is probably culturally incapable of even imagining.
NT is portable. It's been ported to at least four CPUs that I know of (x86, Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC), and MS has announced that they will deliver it on ARM.
I don't much care for MS, but pretending that they're incapable of writing a portable OS is nonsense.
Portability was one of the first things Microsoft sacrificed to get things "working right".
And the OS engineers who wrote the "portable" NT code have long since vested and moved on. The new kids on the block have probably never seen their code.
This is patently false.
> And the OS engineers who wrote the "portable" NT code have long since vested and moved on. The new kids on the block have probably never seen their code.
As an ex-Microsoftie I can tell you that you are wrong. Check Dave Cutler, Larry Wang and several other engineers (even from the original VMS team) still at Microsoft. NT has been ported to several different architectures internally many times over, though commercially only the x86 and PowerPC (XBox 360) variants have been widely released. Itanium ports worked perfectly well, but there was never any significant market for it.