POST WINDOWS ERA :: Microsoft Midori

Microsoft closing the windows and opening the doors!

Microsoft is incubating a componentized non-Windows operating system code named Midori, the predecessor to Windows Vista. Microsoft’s logic behind the naming of midori is still mysterious, as it has different meaning in different languages. Microsoft has kicked off a research project to create software that will take over when it retires Windows. Midori, the cut-down operating system is radically different to Microsoft's older programs. It is centred on the internet and does away with the dependencies that tie Windows to a single PC. It is seen as Microsoft's answer to rivals' use of "virtualisation" as a way to solve many of the problems of modern-day computing.

Midori 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. 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.

Singularity is an attempt by Microsoft to create a completely new built from scratch operating system. It has an entirely new Microkernel, process management and a made over task and resource allocation manager.

According to SDTimes, Midori will be focused not on the desktop as Windows was, but on the cloud and on connected systems. With Windows 7, Microsoft is already bridging the operating system with Windows Live, but Midori will take this aspect one step further in the quest for what will end up as the first fully-fledged Software + Services platform from Microsoft.

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.

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.

The Midori documents indicate that the company has not decided what user interface abstractions are appropriate when applications cut across boundaries, or how to combine the best qualities of rich client applications and Web applications.

Unlike Windows, Microsoft intends for Midori to be componentized from the beginning to achieve performance and security benefits. It will have strong isolation boundaries and enforced contracts between components, to ensure that servicing one component will not cause others to fail.

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.