Microsoft Midori - Tomorrow’s Operating System
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In light of Microsoft’s newest operating system, codenamed “Windows 7″, a different project is coming to fruition in Redmond, this project called “Midori”. Microsoft’s Midori is an operating system project which could, one day, become the successor to Windows. Midori is a branch off the Singularity project which aims to create a better cloud computing platform in which your programs, files, and settings would be blurred between your local disks and a cloud computing phantasmagoria. The outcome? You will likely be able to run Midori locally or sync it through the cloud to multiple systems. The project is in an “incubation” stage, so it’s nowhere near ready for mainstream use. But, can you imagine a time where there’s not Windows?
“That sounds possible—I’ve heard rumors to the effect that he [Rudder] had an OS project in place,” said Rob Helm, director of research at Directions on Microsoft. He noted that it is quite possible that the project is just exploratory, but conceivably a step above what Microsoft Research does.
One of Microsoft’s goals is to provide options for Midori applications to co-exist with and interoperate with existing Windows applications, as well as to provide a migration path.
Building Midori from the ground up to be connected underscores how much computing has changed since Microsoft’s engineers first designed Windows; there was no Internet as we understand it today, the PC was the user’s sole device and concurrency was a research topic.
Today, users move across multiple devices, consume and share resources remotely, and the applications that they use are a composite of local and remote components and services. To that end, Midori will focus on concurrency, both for distributed applications and local ones.
According to the documentation, Midori will be built with an asynchronous-only architecture that is built for task concurrency and parallel use of local and distributed resources, with a distributed component-based and data-driven application model, and dynamic management of power and other resources.
Read the full article at http://tinyurl.com/6opneu
I personally don’t use any of Microsoft’s web based Windows Live applications because I don’t think that they’re any good. I would hope that if this project ever does become a reality, our friends in Redmond would not base this off of the current Windows Live platform. Instead, use something similar to Zoho office or the Google Apps. I’m not closed to using Microsoft’s services, but they should do something that puts them above the host of web apps that are already on the market to attract people to Midori.
Another thing that remains to be seen is the cost. How will consumers be charged for Midori? I doubt that Midori will be free, despite the open-source revolution. Perhaps Midori will be paid for on a subscription basis, much like MobileMe. Or, maybe Microsoft will build on their current marketing scheme and go with approximately 8 million versions. These questions remain to be answered, and may never be answered. It all depends on the progress of the project and the practical applications of it.
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3 Comments
Marcus Hamaker
August 1st, 2008
at 12:20pm
I am always concerned that MS will plan to release this great new product but in the end as with so many things in the recent past, it will fall far short of expectations. I hope this doesn’t happen this time, for MS’s sake and for ours but I am skeptical. When I first heard about this project I was very excited, let’s hope that the move away from the NT kernel will be a good move and that they can really re-think their approach. Right now I believe that Apple has done the best with using the Darwin kernel and really re-designing their OS.
You know what? Get the team from the Surface project http://www.microsoft.com/surface/index.h…) over there into the Windows team. They seem to be really forward thinking.
Matthew stalepie
September 8th, 2008
at 12:53am
I like the idea of IBM or Microsoft offering a server-side OS. It would mean you’d need less computing power at home, and home PCs, laptops and mobile devices could be even cheaper. They would need to be able to handle intense web applications, but the computing would largely be done on the server-side. The operating services would largely be done on the server side. So far there’s no organization for this kind of venture to practically take place. You can’t just log into Google or IBM with a name and password and see a file manager in your web browser that shows your skydrive. Imagine, though, if Windows Explorer was intimately connected to Windows Live Skydrive, or Box.net, or some other online hard drive service, and you couldn’t see much difference between the two? Well, actually these kind of features go way back in Windows. You could look at FTP inside Windows Explorer. I remember when making an Angelfire site, you could just type in like http://ftp.angelfire.com into any Explorer window and you’d see your website’s files and you could drag and drop. This was how iexplore.exe and explorer.exe were always tied together. It’s weird, after all these years, people still don’t really know how Windows works. Do they know the code? can they discern it from years of usage?
Chrome wants to be more than a web browser. It comes with its own task manager. But that’s about the only OS-like feature it has. Maybe Google has plans to offer a SkyDrive-like service and eventually you’ll be accessing your “desktop” inside the web browser. But what does it really change? It just makes it more convenient not to have to transfer files from one computer to the next, I guess. And you wouldn’t have to install as much software across multiple computers. Each computer, most people’s computers, would have very little software installed on them. Perhaps Google and other companies are waiting for the web to get faster, or for fundamentally new CPU technologies to arrive.
Matthew stalepie
September 8th, 2008
at 1:00am
Well, perhaps it’s false to accuse Chrome of wanting to be anything more than a browser. By their own words, they just wanted to make a browser that was better at handling applications rather than just read-only websites. I guess what they need to release next is an in-browser mp3 and ogg player. I’d kind of rather see Flash become a common way to store music and movies, though. Right now Chrome doesn’t handle Flash too well.
Quake Live will also help encourage people to do everything inside a browser. What’s it all mean? Why is everything happening so slyly? Is the desktop going extinct? Will we have less freedom in the future, freedom to own our own files and data? They must all be stored on servers that we pay to have access to?