But the OS was a factor
If my airplane flies using a particular brand of engine, and those engines often blow their engine internals out their tailpipe, then that engine should be part of the discussion, no?
Not trying to shift any blame here. An embedded and hardened UNIX system would be the more appropriate OS for something critical.
Windows can be a perfectly fine OS if patched, hardened, and tested effectively.... should it be part of the alarm system for an oil drilling platform? No.
To be fair, there are two components to the alarm/monitoring systems used on something like an oil platform. There are the operational controls/alarms which do use embedded RTOS and the code it all baked into the hardware, typically PLCs. Then there are the informational systems, which gather the SCADA data from the hardware, and those commonly are Windows apps. ( see Stuxnet and SCADA issue with Iranian centrifuges).
