Sorry Ben,

But I strongly believe that there is a misunderstanding. When I read "So you very first data point is incorrect", the first that came into my mind was: does not Window 95 released in 1995 and require 4Mb of RAM?. Now I realize that you are trying to justify in software what I believe that cannot separate from hardware.

You are right pointing out that Windows Vista was different. In fact, when Vista came out I already had years of experience working a lot on 64 bits multiprocessor and multithreaded systems, and Vista, for the first time, provided an advanced API to deal with concurrency and synchronization, so, I could start developing also for Windows. But all those expensive features that you mention, were already implemented for years in UNIX OS with much less hardware requirements.

What I believe that you completely dismissed is how software development changes when you are highly limited in hardware.