Microsoft's plans for post-Windows OS revealed

SDTimes.com ^ | July 29, 2008 | David Worthington

[bamahead]

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.

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, 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.

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.

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.

The Midori documents foresee applications running across a multitude of topologies, ranging from client-server and multi-tier deployments to peer-to-peer at the edge, and in the cloud data center. Those topologies form a heterogeneous mesh where capabilities can exist at separate places.

In order to efficiently distribute applications across nodes, Midori will introduce a higher-level application model that abstracts the details of physical machines and processors. The model will be consistent for both the distributed and local concurrency layers, and it is internally known as Asynchronous Promise Architecture.

[Mr. Jeeves]

...or they could just convert to OSX, like their customers.

Might be their best move. Regardless, they are going to need to bite the bullet, undertake the ground-up OS redesign that Apple did for OS/X, and tell Grandma and the big corporations that their Windows 95-era apps just aren't going to work any more. ;)

[Mr. Jeeves]

Except for OS/2's single messaging queue that let one bad application lock up the system, just like DOS. ;)

OS/2 was exactly what you would expect a desktop OS designed by veteran IBM mainframe systems programmers to be - perfectly safe because it couldn't actually run any of those pesky and dangerous applications users needed to operate their businesses. Where it ran dedicated, limited apps like ATMs it was fairly successful - as a user desktop it was a disaster.

IBM made the opposite mistake from Microsoft - supporting nothing instead of supporting everything - and OS/2 crashed and burned a lot sooner because of it. Vista shows the folly of the opposite extreme, but Microsoft has made a whole lot of money in the interim.

[GOP Poet]

Microsoft has gotten a serious beat down by Apple. Seems they are the last to know though. They need some innovative, new leadership. They have been on creative & innovative life support for well, well over a decade.

[JoJo Gunn]

The Midori documents foresee applications running across a multitude of topologies, ranging from client-server and multi-tier deployments to peer-to-peer at the edge, and in the cloud data center. Those topologies form a heterogeneous mesh where capabilities can exist at separate places.

Jeez, is this the true article source? :)

[Grut]

Actually, Midori can be quite tasty

Yup:

[Core_Conservative]

Wonder if it will similar to LINUX - I will be converting all of my computers (current count is 6) to LINUX - much more friendly and cheaper to run (of course I used to be a UNIX admin)

[VeniVidiVici]

Translated into English, does that mean it won’t be a bloated cow of an operating system like Vista?

It means you'll never see it at home.

[zeugma]

if we could harness just a percentage of it in a networked environment it would be huge

Already being done.

google Botnets

[antiRepublicrat]

For the serious multithreading, the best I’ve ever seen was BeOS. A dual-processor PowerPC with BeOS could play several videos, animations and music at the same time without a hiccup — in the mid 90s.

This goes a little further though, but then it is over 10 years later.

[antiRepublicrat]

OS X with XGrid.

[mr snerd]

ping

[mr snerd]

ping

[shorty_harris]

One day, that probably will make it to the consumer level...sad to say. Then it will be like dealing with the cable company.

Ughh...I'll never move beyond the rabbit ears of computing...

[ccmay]

Copland 2.0. Or is that Pink?

-ccm

[j_tull]

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.

I'm a professional geek working in a 100% Windows environement. I also spent twenty years in the US Navy. That sentence is the most impressive example of geek-speak nonsense I have ever had the pleasure to parse.

[Bikkuri]

Midori means “green” in Japanese...