By Ina Fried, 6 August 2008 12:12
NEWS
Microsoft is pursuing a different type of operating system, which goes by the name of Midori - and it's not the next version of Windows.
Midori has received a great deal of attention in recent days but Microsoft has refused to say anything about Midori beyond confirming it's an "incubation project" within the company.
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Midori is related to Singularity, a research project that dates back to 2003 and looks at how to architect an operating system from the ground up, considering the past of computing and where things are headed in terms of parallelism and cloud computing.
Whereas Singularity was a research effort firmly confined to a small team of researchers inside Microsoft's in-house labs, Midori is an effort to see if there is something commercially viable that could come out of it.
A public mention of Midori was within a research paper on a bug-finding program called Chess. On one PowerPoint slide, it mentions a list of "current Chess applications" of which one bullet point is "Singularity/Midori (OS in managed code)".
That syncs with the SDTimes report, which talks about Midori as an OS for the age in which computing resources can be either local or in the internet cloud and in which processing tasks can be split among multiple processors and multiple machines.
It's worth noting Microsoft often has incubation projects that seek to explore whether an all-new approach to a product might be justified. That said, up to this point, every update to Office and Windows has been some type of incremental improvement, not a ground-up rewrite.
Back in 2000, the company had an effort called NetDocs that many thought might replace Office with an online productivity suite. Eight years - and at least three Office versions later - that has not materialised, suggesting Midori is probably a long way off.
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