I never said that this was presented as an idea from MS. You're reading into the editorial a bit much. This was something I've wanted for a long time, since NT4 actually when we got the "basic tuning" for the server that let you decide if this was primary a server by putting GUI tasks in the background as low priority.

Many of the talks I've heard from MS engineers were on various things. I have heard talks about the memory management, NUMA, the schedulers and how they are spun up based on resources, etc. In many of these talks the people have done research in their areas, and they know what they are presenting on. Even in the talks where they are giving something new, it's not that they haven't researched it, but that they have a different perspective.

Lots of companies look to apply old ideas in new ways, or to their own products. There are lots of reasons to bash Microsoft, but this isn't one of them. I don't even think them applying "old" ideas as something "new" in their product is a reason to complain.