It's easy to be smug now knowing how things turned out, but lots of really brilliant people agreed with Professor Tanenbaum at the time. The difficulties that

It's easy to be smug now knowing how things turned out, but lots of really brilliant people agreed with Professor Tanenbaum at the time. The difficulties that microkernel projects ended up encountering were not easy to forecast and ended up taking virtually everyone by suprise. It was in the spirit of progress towards better ways of architecture software that Tanenbaum and Stallman (as well as many others) chose to try a new architecture rather than just build yet another monolithic OS kernel. Being on the pointy end of technology means you often end up being the one to discover what doesn't work.