I am coming to this from the perspective of a UN*X user, which I think is the target audience for this product – Microsoft wants to entice administrators who are used to the UN*X way: powerful shell languages allowing you to do anything from the console – remote access, administer, script and even build complete applications using a simple language that is fast to work with.

Powershell looks more like bash/ksh/csh than any other Microsoft technology (excuse me, but CMD batch processing is a horrible pile of junk that hasn’t gained a single feature since MS-DOS 7.0 days, and VBScript as a system administration language is a sad joke), but when I use it I am mostly reminded in how much MS-Windows is not UN*X – Powershell is not simple, it is not fast, and it is not comfortable.

It does offer remote shell -like access (using WinRM with WMF 3.0), which while could be easier to set up and still suffers from all the problems of Powershell itself, is still so much better than needing to open a full screen RDP session every time you want to manage a remote machine.