The Software Development Times has run an extremely long and in-depth article on Midori, the post-Windows cloud-computing chupacabra-OS that is supposed to be coming down the line one of these years. From what I understand, it’s still in a completely larval state, although the article talks about it as if its about to be launched next week. It’s to be extremely modular and very connected, using in-betweener apps that store things here and there, locally and in the cloud, and are location- and hardware-aware.
I can’t pretend I understand everything in the article; some of sounds suspiciously like nonsense, like “being architected from the ground up” and “Those topologies form a heterogeneous mesh where capabilities can exist at separate places.” Then again, I’m pretty uninformed about things like stacks and tiers, so it could be they’re just talking at a level that just sounds like gibberish to me, like speaking in tongues. In any case it’s nice to hear about Microsoft, often portrayed as inertial and dinosaur-ish, actually doing new things and looking forward, although who knows how many of these features will make it to the final product.
Remember, it’s still a thing of research and may or may not actually eventuate into a product.
It’s more likely, at this stage, pieces/ideas from that will be rolled into future Microsoft Windows products in the next 5 to 10+ years.
Microsoft does a lot of research. And have done so for many, many years. It’s always interesting to see what they are doing in MSR.
Many features in today’s Vista came out of MSR projects (according to various videos/articles regarding project transfers from MSR to actual products).
Yeah – I remember the last I heard of Midori it was still a bunch of individual products and concepts, a sort of loose group of pre-pre-alpha software waiting for a unifying, actual OS. This article talks about it like they had a hands-on with some whole product; I think they’re pushing it a bit.
Great piece of information … is microsoft going to change the computing world?