Comment by jeroenhd

For all of Windows' shortcomings, I think their service manager is quite good for something built two or three decades ago. They fell behind since, but it took a while for init.d to disappear in Linux and some distros still use it. I even think Microsoft had the right idea not to use 1970's main() and signalling code as service control, using dedicated callback APIs instead.

Together with Windows' Task Scheduler and PowerShell, you can configure Windows daemons quite well. They're limited by problems like "services can't take command line arguments", though, which is unfortunate.