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Windows Is Dead – Long Live Midori?
parvenu74 writes "A story from Infoworld is suggesting that the days of Windows are numbered and that Microsoft is preparing a web-based operating system code-named Midori as a successor. Midori is reported to be an offshoot of Microsoft Research's Singularity OS, an all-managed code microkernel OS which leverages a technology called software isolated processes (SIPs) to overcome the traditional inter-thread communications issues of microkernel OSes."
Midori will *not* be "web based", whatever the hell that means.
Being "internet centric" and connected to "the cloud" is not the same has being web based.
Midori is being designed in such a way that components of the OS communicate with each other in a location independent manner. API calls to a local machine are no different than API calls to a remote machine. These calls will also be "message based" (there are lots of ways to interpret that) and be transactional in nature.
Above these kinds of low level things, there will be a much tighter and more integrated connection to the network. Your profile will roam with you no matter where you are using P2P style communications similar to how Live Mesh works, although supported by core OS components instead of via RSS synchronization.
So if your idea of a "web based" OS is like what I've described above, then yes... it's web based.
But if you're thinking about a subscription-based model where a user must boot their OS "from the web" like a dumb terminal, then you're way off.
Lastly, this thing is at least 7 to 10 years off. Windows 7 will ship sometime next year (or perhaps early in 2010), and Midori isn't even out of MS Research yet. If we saw something like this before Windows 8 / 2015, I'd be damn surprised.