Microsoft prepares for end of Windows with Midori

[PAN5Y]

Microsoft prepares for end of Windows with Midori
With the Internet increasingly taking on the role of the PC operating system and the growing prevalence of virtualization technologies, there likely will be a day when the Windows client operating system as it has been developed for the past 20-odd years becomes obsolete.
By Elizabeth Montalbano

According to published reports, Microsoft Corp. seems to be preparing for that day with an incubation project codenamed Midori, which seeks to create a componentized, non-Windows operating system that will take advantage of technologies not available when Windows first was conceived.

Although Microsoft won't comment publicly on what Midori is, the company has confirmed that it exists. Several reports — the most comprehensive to date published on Tuesday by Software Development Times — have gone much further than that.

That report paints Midori as an Internet-centric operating system, based on the idea of connected systems, that largely eliminates the dependencies between local applications and the hardware they run on that exist with a typical operating system today.

The report claims Midori is an offshoot of Microsoft Research's Singularity operating system project that creates "software-isolated processes" to reduce the dependencies between individual applications, and between the applications and the operating system itself.

With the current ability to run an operating system, applications and even an entire PC desktop in a virtual container using a hypervisor, there is less and less need to have the operating system and applications be installed natively on a PC, said Brian Madden, an independent technology analyst.

"Why do you need it?" he said. "Now we have hypervisors everywhere."

Madden suggested that a future operating system could actually be a hypervisor itself, with virtual containers of applications running on top of it that can be transferred easily to other devices because they don't have client-side dependencies to each other.

And while he has no information about Midori beyond the published reports, he said descriptions of it as an Internet-centric system that provides an overall "connectedness" between applications and devices makes sense for the future of cloud computing and on-demand services. Microsoft likely recognizes the need for this, even if the actual technology is still five or more years out, Madden said.

"They're preparing for the day when people realize we don't need Windows anymore," and thinking about what the company has to do to remain relevant, he said.

Indeed, Microsoft has been emphasizing its virtualization strategy, based on its new Hyper-V hypervisor. The company is also moving full steam ahead with plans to virtualize applications and the desktop operating system as well.

Using virtualization in these scenarios would eliminate the problems with application compatibility that are still giving headaches to Windows Vista users, and that have made the operating system a liability rather than a boon for some Windows power users and enterprise customers.

If Midori is close to what people think it is, it will represent a "major paradigm shift" for Windows users and be no easy task for Microsoft to pull off, said Andrew Brust, chief of new technology at the consulting firm Twentysix New York.

Brust said the challenges faced by Microsoft on a technology like Midori would include technical complexities and the "sobering compromises" that must be made when a product moves from being a research project into commercialization. "I would expect those in abundance with something of this scope and import," he added.

Although he hasn't been briefed by Microsoft on Midori, Brust said the idea makes sense because the company needs to drastically update Windows to stay current with new business models and computing approaches — particularly to help it compete against Google Inc. on the Web.

"Breaking with the legacy of a product that first shipped 23 years ago seems wholly necessary in terms of keeping the product manageable and in sync with computing's state of the art," Brust said. "If Midori isn't real, then I imagine something of this nature still must be in the works. It's absolutely as necessary, if not more so, to Microsoft's survival as their initiatives around Internet advertising, search and cloud computing offerings."

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9111018

[Kedzi]

@Chri5: I think ?
I don't get it either...

[Tylertut]

me no comprende

[kRAzI]

confused. i don't get it

[dhack]

eliminate the operating system: it's just dead weight, and without it everything could all work much better. the cloud is basically an EPIC server where people can store their programs and the files that go with them. then there's pretty much a door between the programs and what you choose to run them on (OS X, Vista, Windows 95, anything) and that door allows you to run any program on any OS, so that the OS doesn't have to be bought over and over again (because the newer OSs are just the old ones, but shinier and, in most cases, fixed up a bit)

It's to stop us from just buying the same OS over and over again.

It will save everyone time and money

[.WTFish]

i hope its better then vista..

[kRAzI]

vista isn't really that bad. u just gotta have a gd pc to run it.

anyways. this sounds intersting. osx on windows?midori? is apple in on this?

but then there will be updated versions of midori. like
midori 2
midori 3
etc.

[xBrandonx]

No, my laptop came with it, and I installed XP on it and its wayyyyy faster. No lie. But Vista is ight, looks good, but XP FTW!

[kRAzI]

Originally Posted by xBrandonx

No, my laptop came with it, and I installed XP on it and its wayyyyy faster. No lie. But Vista is ight, looks good, but XP FTW!

wut kind of laptop did u buy? and it came with vista right?
lots of laptops now don't support xp so its hard to get the drivers. i've put xp on some laptops that have vista on them and it was a pain in the a$$ to get the drivers to work on xp.

though toshiba still supports cause my mom got a satellite a210 and i put xp on it. all the xp drivers are provided by toshiba.

[CHAINS]

What about Vienna aka Windows7?