Post-Vista plans announced, Midori OS related to Singularity research

Microsoft has been keeping the raps on a non-Windows-based operating system known as Midori, which is being built from the ground up to become the predecessor to Windows Vista.  Microsoft realized it’s going to take more than simply improving on its existing technology to turn itself around.

According to SD Times,  internal Microsoft documents have been leaked that outline Midori’s proposed design, which is Internet-centric and predicated on the prevalence of connected systems.  It’s an offshoot of Microsoft Research’s Singularity operating system, and the tools and libraries of which are completely managed code.  Midori is designed to run directly on native hardware (x86, x64 and ARM), be hosted on the Windows Hyper-V hypervisor, or even be hosted by a Windows process.

One of Microsoft’s goals is to provide options for Midori applications to co-exist with and inter-operate with existing Windows applications, as well as to provide a usable migration path.  Building Midori from the ground up to be inter-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 still just a research topic.  This antiquated way of thinking, which Microsoft has been late in shedding, has lead to a lot of its dismay in recent years.  Completely turning the tables around and building an OS based on a new way of thinking is exactly what it’s going to take.

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 all mixed together. With that in mind, 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.

This so-called "cloud-computing" aspect of the Midori OS seems to be what the future holds, and I think it’s right.  The Internet will become the ultimate central storage unit, and simple, cheap hardware will be all that’s needed to access it.  They had the right idea right way back when, can they predict and do the same thing in the future?

• Goodnight XP, goodnight Vista, hello Midori
• New details emerge on Midori, end of Windows coming, enter cloud computing
• More Vista SP1-related patches coming Tuesday
• Microsoft plans to make Windows 7 more modular than Vista
• Research suggests a third of corporate users ‘downgrade’ to XP