I think it is more of a dig on academic operating systems research, which some say hasn't made any major breakthroughs since the 1980's, possibly because we have been stuck on the same architecture for so long.

IMO, the focus on Windows vs UNIX/Linux or HP vs MS is really missing the point though. If you build a computer as they are suggesting, using non-volatile memory without a deep memory hierarchy, and with an optical interconnect that enables low-latency memory access across a datacenter, then that changes a huge number of the assumptions that led to the operating systems we have now. In order to really take advantage of such a machine, you really need to invent new operating systems. You can hack Linux to run on it, which is what they said they are doing, but you will lose some of the benefits of the hardware because the architecture assumptions are baked into the fundamental design of existing OSes. File systems are one example that is easy to think about. Virtual memory. But consider anything that an OS does and how this new architecture changes it. Consider loading executables to start a process, for example. If there is no difference between memory and disk, then you don't even need to load executables into memory. All files would be memory-mapped in some huge global address space. Programs could jump from memory in one machine to a whole different machine (VM migration? HA?). It really changes everything. We would need new R&D, some of it very fundamental, in order to understand and build systems to take full advantage of such technology. That's all HP is saying in this announcement.

It's a sad fact that the two dominant OSs these days are a copy of Unix and the bastard child of VMS.

I'd love to see some fresh approaches to this old problem.

And aapl and ibm.