Microsoft's Midori

A long gap between two posts. It is not lethargy, but absence of any new technologies that can change computing dramatically. All that has been happening was in the form of updates of older and already existent technologies. be it Nintendo, iPhone 3g or Macbook Air. Essentially, these all have been upgrades of previous products and not path-breakers like iPod. A new thing on the horizon, however, sounds interesting and too complicated to me. If we are to believe, there may be future for desktop computing sans Windows or any Microsoft OS.

According to a report, Microsoft isn't just looking at the next version of Windows for future OS possibilities, but is looking beyond the Windows architecture altogether with a project known as Midori. The new OS is still in the "incubation" phase (which puts it slightly closer to market than R&D projects), but Microsoft has admitted to its existence, and the Software Daily Times says at least one team in Redmond is actively working on the new architecture.

The basis for the platform centers around research related to Microsoft's Singularity project, and envisions a distributed environment where applications, documents, and connectivity are blurred in a cloud-computing phantasmagoria which can be run natively or hosted across multiple systems.

Says the SD Times, "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."