Minwin didn't ship on its own, but was really an artifact of their efforts to make the components in the kernel less dependent on each other, while developing W

Minwin didn't ship on its own, but was really an artifact of their efforts to make the components in the kernel less dependent on each other, while developing Windows Vista. I'm not sure how successful their efforts were, seeing as even "Server Core", supposedly the most minimal Windows Server edition possible, still mandates a GUI. I recall reading an article which talked about the kernel team assigning level numbers to every kernel component, giving the GUI a high level processor scheduling and such a low level, and trying to reduce the dependency between the different levels. Minwin was merely a Windows kernel that has none of the higher level components, but the problem with it is that they didn't manage to completely modularize the kernel so that if you would add some new components they would require a slew of other components. Still, they've managed to make Internet Explorer optional, but I'm not sure what other benefits the modularization of Windows Vista's kernel has brought.