Microsoft's plans for post-Windows OS revealed

By David Worthington

July 29, 2008 — (Page 1 of 7)
Microsoft is incubating a componentized non-Windows operating system known as Midori, which is being architected from the ground up to tackle challenges that Redmond has determined cannot be met by simply evolving its existing technology.

SD Times has viewed internal Microsoft documents that outline Midori’s proposed design, which is Internet-centric and predicated on the prevalence of connected systems.

Midori is an offshoot of Microsoft Research’s Singularity operating system, 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.

According to published reports, Eric Rudder, senior vice president for technical strategy at Microsoft and an alumnus of Bill Gates' technical staff, is heading up the effort. Rudder served as senior vice president of Microsoft’s Servers and Tools group until 2005. A Microsoft spokesperson refused comment.

“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.

Related Search Term(s): cloud computing, mobile development, .NET, SOA & SaaS, software development, Windows, Microsoft

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Comments

02/17/2009 08:29:54 AM EST

m........nice stuff. i want to know more about midori.

Indiasiva

08/13/2009 10:59:39 PM EST

This may sound very "retro" or MS incorrect but really is important to me and many others is MS-DOS and Gwbasic compatibility. MS-DOS and Gwbasic are beautiful and minimalistic and sinmple to deal with ... like a model A Ford etc. will Midori support a DOS emulator ? If not it should

United StatesLen Schneider

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