Midori - Microsoft's Next OS after Windows

Microsoft begins phasing out Windows XP by no longer providing copies of the operating system to PC makers and retailers for preloading on new machines from 2008 June 30 . It’s also a good day to start looking ahead to what comes next — after Windows. Midori is the next thing after Windows from MS. Eric Rudder heads this project, attempt to realize Gates’ vision of a truly object-oriented, distributed operating system.

Microsoft has started a new research project Midori, to develop a software program that will help uncouple Windows from a single PC. The company has revealed that a decision to develop Midori was taken because Windows is unlikely to be able to cope with the pace of change in future technology, and the way people use it.

"If you think about how an operating system is loaded, it's loaded onto a hard disk physically located on that machine. The operating system is tied very tightly to that hardware," the BBC quoted Dave Austin, European director of products at Citrix, as saying.

He said that that created all kinds of dependencies that arose out of the collection of hardware in a particular machine, and raised concerns for Microsoft's business in case Windows ends up being less important over time as applications become more OS agnostic.

A statement issued by Microsoft describes Midori as an ambitious attempt by Microsoft to catch up on the work on virtualisation being undertaken in the wider computer industry. Microsoft has said little about Midori and isn't commenting publicly on the project. But company research documents confirm that the project exists and is related to a public project called Singularity -- under which Microsoft developers are creating a slimmed down OS for use in the research community.

During a recent talk on a software tool called Chess, which is designed to check the status of programs that run in multithreaded architectures, Microsoft researchers Madan Musuvathi and Shaz Qadeer made reference to Midori by name in a PowerPoint presentation, documents show. In one slide, the researchers describe Midori as "OS in managed code." Midori, if it makes its way to the market, could solve a number of problems for Microsoft. The current version of Windows, known as Vista, has been poorly received by IT managers. Many view it as too large and resource hungry, and too desktop-centric, for an era in which much of business computing's heavy lifting is migrating to the Web.

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