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."

Comments

Prediction

[kalpol]

web-based == subscription model.

Re:Prediction

[TubeSteak]

web-based == man in the middle attacks

Can you imagine a MITM on your OS?
Bad guys would no longer need physical access to your box,
Only access to your network.

Re:Prediction

[CastrTroy]

Even if high speed wireless internet access was as wide spread as cellphone access, would that still be enough? There are enough dead zones, that many people would not be able to access their computer at all, which is unacceptable. Also, people seem to forget that the wireless is pretty limited. It works well for now, when people are just downloading email, or browsing a few websites, but I think the amount of bandwidth to run (what would amount to) a remote desktop connection, multiplied by the number of people using windows, would quickly overload any kind of wireless setup we could get. Obviously not everybody would have to use wireless connections, but if everybody who was currently using their desktop on wireless started using a remote desktop on wireless, the system would undergo a lot of strain.

Re:Prediction

[Hatta]

How does one have a web-based operating system anyway? If you're running your OS inside a web browser, what is the web browser running on? Is it just turtles all the way down?

Re:Prediction

[snl2587]

All data and stuff gets placed into Microsoft server and you are using your terminal only to access it - from anywhere that you want.

I'm sorry: I trust no company with all of my data. That's why I don't use Google docs or Microsoft's current document offering. And now they want to store all of my data? I, for one, will gladly continue using Linux.

Re:Prediction

[MightyYar]

If the replacement rate for a desktop computer is 3 years, and everyone buys for $250 and Windows for $130 - that's less than $400 over 3 years... or just over $10 monthly.

If I had a website that offered full MS Office functionality and compatibility for $10/month... wanna bet I'd have some takers? They'd need 366 million customers to equal their current revenue using this model.

Worldwide, PC sales are supposed to grow to over 250 million/year by 2010, so while their target would be ambitious - it is feasible if they could rope roughly half of new PC buyers into this new model.

Re:Prediction

[negRo_slim]

If I had a website that offered full MS Office functionality and compatibility for $10/month...

I concur, there would be probably be tremendous interest. I just wonder if it being a Microsoft branded product wouldn't be a detriment to it's success as opposed to it being judged purely on the merits of what it offers. But allow me to play the devil's advocate for a moment and suggest for gamers this might not be such a bad thing. (Potentially) Less OS on the hard disk could mean lower resource utilization and I'm sure a few enterprising users would find further ways to enhance performance maybe something a kin to tuning current Window's services so as to prevent unnecessary network access?

Re:Prediction

[Dogtanian]

I'm sorry: I trust no company with all of my data. That's why I don't use Google docs or Microsoft's current document offering. And now they want to store all of my data? I, for one, will gladly continue using Linux.

No, no! You're only allowed to use that phrase if you welcome our data-hoarding overlords!

Re:Prediction

[Ariastis]

Banks are covered by specific laws.

Online services are barely covered and privacy policies are wobbly at best. (They can't even statuate if EULAs are binding contracts for fuck's sake)

Re:Prediction

[nizo]

Wanna check your email? That'll be $1. Wanna post to ./?? That'll be $2.

[after searching Clippy pops up]

I'm sorry, I was unable to process your credit card number on file. To see all of the search results, please enter a valid credit card number.

Re:Prediction

[Pincus]

The 366 million seems ambitious, but an online model would also curtail some piracy. The equivalent of copying my Windows disk would be to give out my i-Windows login, meaning they would just use my desktop.

Of course, why not, especially if the cost is high, share it between users? Especially if it will support multiple desktops, won't every household maintain one OS for multiple users?

Re:Prediction

[Anonymous Coward]

# ln -s /usr/bin/firefox /sbin/init

Re:Prediction

[Anonymous Coward]

Or is everyone here just universally paranoid? :)

[Posting as AC for obvious privacy reasons]

Why do you want to know?

Re:Prediction

[debatem1]

A very close parallel to what you're talking about already exists- several of them, in fact. Ulteo, for instance, provides a web-based Linux desktop that runs OpenOffice.

If you really want to push the Office-as-a-service idea though, it would be simple enough to do it by taking something like splashtop and put in a VNC, NX, or SSH client, then connect to a grid of application publishing servers. Very simple, pretty clean, and dead cheap to develop. No need for a new OS. The connectivity requirements would be pretty steep, but they always are for systems like this, which (IMHO) is why most people don't use them.

Re:Prediction

[MightyYar]

Not apples and oranges. The bank doesn't just have your money. They have information in bucketloads about you... they know everyone you've ever written a check to, everyone you've ever paid electronically, and how much money you make and spend.

Re:Prediction

[quanticle]

You obviously don't remember the days of Xterms running over 10baseT from a Sun server. Fully graphical workstations playing xtank and so on remotely on less bandwidth than high speed wireless.

You do realize that even 10BaseT is faster than most cable modems in the US, right? In fact, the situation is even worse than you'd expect, seeing as how most Internet connections in the US are set up to give downloads more throughput than uploads. A heavyweight application like Office would require a much more symmetric connection than users have today.

Re:Prediction

[quanticle]

The bank does have all that information. However, the bank is also covered by federal and state privacy laws that prohibit it from disclosing that information to third parties. Many of these online companies, on the other hand, base their entire business model around disclosing the data that you provide them to affiliates.

Re:Prediction

[nko321]

Nah. They just break it up.

Want Windows? Cool! Just $10 / month!
Word? Excel? Outlook? No prob, just another $10 / month.
Project? Access? PowerPoint? No sweat, just pull out another $20 / month each.
You want SharePoint? Exchange? Easy, just $5 / month per seat!

Want each of those? Microsoft is making $90 / month off a single person. For the amount of functionality it provides, plenty of people would pay that. That's over $1000 / year. And no one can save money by sticking to old versions! As software ages and settles, more people are satisfied with old software. A subscription model erases this problem for Microsoft, who sees that trend as probably the most dangerous possible roadblock to growth.

Re:Prediction

[Chris Mattern]

Also, money is fungible. Put dollars in, get dollars out. There's no real problem provided that the bank doesn't do anything to improperly endanger the "get dollars out" part. But your data can be read and put to use by app provider and you'd never know.

Re:Prediction

[iceborer]

They can't even statuate if EULAs are binding contracts for fuck's sake

I believe that you may have envocabularized a word who existence was not heretofore knowledged.

Re:Prediction

[Bugs42]

Nonesense.
It was a perfectly cromulent word, the use of which embiggens us all.

Re:Prediction

[Lord Apathy]

Well it all depends on how you use it. Back when I was married to The Bitch we had one master computer running linux that we both used. Sharing time on it was a bitch because I used it for work, and she used it for play. To solve this issue I rounded up a old '486, a 20 MB HD, and a 15" display. Piece of crap. I installed a very slimmed down linux, just enough to boot and connect the X server to central host.

She had her play computer and I had a work computer and everything was fine.

Actually there is was a interesting turn on that set up. After we separated her and some of her cult buddies broke in to my house and stole that X terminal I made her. I found out through a friend that they did that because they didn't me reading the email she left on "it" or having access to her icq logs. I found it very amusing that she had stole the wrong computer.

And if you wondering. Yes, I did look through the icq logs and email. I did show them to the judge and use them in court. I found out her nuttiness was more nutty then I ever imagined. I found out she had been abusing my son and what she had planed. So if your going to bitch about her privacy or some such BS, save it.

Re:Prediction

[roc97007]

> As software ages and settles, more people are satisfied with old software.

Exactly. It's true for operating systems, applications, and hardware. The biggest aids to the growth of the PC were it's weaknesses. OS bugs. Application issues. Hardware inadequacies. You needed the next incremental upgrade because this one doesn't work worth a crap. And the one after that when that one didn't do the job either.

At some point, the hardware gets fast enough for the average bloke, and hardware sales start to slump. Office tools get good enough, and sales fall off. The OS gets good enough, why upgrade? The companies who became giant players on this growth paradigm will need to adopt new business models. And probably be a lot smaller.

Mind you, I can see a continued although reduced need for bleeding edge hardware. There will always be gamers and others who are pushing the envelope. How fast does my video need to render? As fast as I can conveniently afford.

But I am having a more difficult time seeing an overriding need for another version of Windows, and I just can't make myself believe we need yet another version of Office. To most of my peers, Office 2000 still works fine, thank you very much.

It occurred to me the other day that I was writing a document in a version of Office that just had it's eighth birthday, on a machine built in 2003, using an OS from 2001. And I said to myself "Cool. I am finally spending more time using my PC than I am upgrading it." And that is as it should be. We are over the technology hump, and no amount of marketing can call that back.

Even the guaranteed vendor pipeline, where nearly all new PCs run whatever latest OS managed to escape from Redmond, has to eventually slump, for the simple reason that whatever is currently on your desk meets your needs. (Imagine that?)

Given all that, what, exactly, does Microsoft have to sell? Or, more accurately, how the heck do they maintain explosive growth in a mature market? It's got to be preying on someone's mind.

Re:Prediction

[Nethemas the Great]

You obviously don't remember the days of Xterms running over 10baseT from a Sun server. Fully graphical workstations playing xtank and so on remotely on less bandwidth than high speed wireless.

You obviously must be living in the third world because here in the US we really don't have anything resembling the slow speed of a 10baseT.

Of course if you're one of those poor fools who fell for a service "advertising" such slow speeds you'll often find them doing fun things like randomly dropping or delaying packets on you.

Rural American service though is by far the most exceptional. In fact if you're a part of rural America you have two really nice options. A dial-up modem over high quality copper cables capable of letting you zip along at 24.4Kbps (note the small 'b') or a snazzy 1Mbps down 200Kbps up (give or take) satellite rig with ultra-low 700ms - 1500ms latency.

This new OS from Microsoft is definitely ready to take center stage! I can hardly wait to wait.

Windows is dead?

[Dunbal]

Personally I will wait to see what netcraft has to say about that.

Thin Client?

[Bryansix]

Remind me again how this differs from a Thin Client?

Re:Thin Client?

[ninjapiratemonkey]

Midori is going to be coded to crash at least once every 24 hours to ease regular Windows users into this "new" technology. Other than that, it's the same.

Re:Thin Client?

[Hairy Heron]

Windows is no longer associated with BSOD.

Exactly. During the early days of Vista it was the Red Screen of Death.

Re:Thin Client?

[mlts]

It seems that every ten years, someone re-invents the thin client.

First it was dumb terminals connected to a mainframe, then to a serial port box so one can connect to a UNIX box.
Then came XStations which used various (direct, indirect, broadcast) forms of XDMCP to find a host to download microcode and run apps from.
Then, it was JavaStations where people talked about fast broadband access to stuff on the ISP's server, and not to worry about all their private documents being stored offsite.

This just seems like more of the same, perhaps an offshoot of cloud computing. It will work for a couple niches here and there, but as a whole, Net based operating systems will fail, as people want to keep their stuff private on their own systems.

Same disadvantages apply. Security of stored files for example -- I trust my external TrueCrypt encrypted drive that uses both a long passphrase and a set of keyfiles a lot more to securely store my Word documents than I do some random ISP's computer.

With a web based OS...

[Thelasko]

what am I going to do with all of that fancy hardware I bought to run Vista?

Re:With a web based OS...

[ivan256]

You'll need it to render the silverlight apps.

A Link to the Print Version?

[phantomcircuit]

A link to the print version in TFS? This cannot be slashdot... damn DNS must have been poisoned!

Here's hoping....

[Jaysyn]

... that it doesn't suck! Linux still needs competition to keep us on our toes!

Why?

[Darkstorm]

I don't get it, why would I want to trust Microsoft, or anyone, with all my files?

I think I like the current model, I buy a computer and it is mine, I can put whatever I want on it, and I can use it with or without the internet.

I guess when my unreliable comcast cable modem drops offline I guess that means a worthless terminal till it comes back up. This is an improvement....how?

Midori is a Linux distro from Transmeta

[3seas]

Midori Linux from Transmeta - Linus T.

Guess MS will just have to change the name....

Re:Midori is a Linux distro from Transmeta

[TorKlingberg]

It's Japanese for "green".

Re:This is great news!

[Wiarumas]

They named it after a porn star because of its gaping (security) holes and abundance of viruses.

Defense against Linux boxes?

[Sockatume]

The Eee and its ilk have shown that people are willing to buy Windowsless boxes, which is an affront to Microsoft's business model. You have to wonder if Midori is a "plan B" to allow them to continue to get revenue from Linux users. Alan, Bob and Clarence may well be willing to pay $10 a month for "Windows access" on their Eees if it lets them use Office, and this way Microsoft have a guaranteed revenue stream whatever OS people actually buy with their machine. Especially if it's agressively marketed and bundled.

Re:No longer associated with BSOD?

[eebra82]

In that case, I suggest that you install one of the first Linux dists and see how much you are willing to forgive and forget. That kind of thinking is just silly as everything sucks at some point, which is why improvements are being made.

Not Web Based

[ThinkFr33ly]

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.

Don't Kid Yourself

[smackenzie]

To believe for a moment that the "days of Windows is numbered" is idiotic. Consider a few points:

1. The PC continues to be a dominant gaming platform which will never fly with a thin client OS or internet OS.

2. 9 out of 10 (my guess, might be higher) businesses out there will never consider an OS that is entirely dependent on a working internet connection. (And don't counter with "well, what about web services companies?" I mean top to bottom activities in a single company such as accounting, HR, project management, security services, legal, design, PR, etc.)

3. There will be a relative correlation between productivity and your internet speed. Not exciting.

4. Most of us would like to remain reasonably productive in environments where there is no internet connection (planes, trains, parks, beach, over seas, etc.)

5. People seem to forget that the browsers themselves as well as many of the browser features that they depend on (Flash, Movies, ActiveX, PDF, Java) all depend on some version of an OS with a "more than thin client and more than kernal" layer to begin with...

Singularity OS is a smart move (managed code, new process security measures). And you'll see a MAJOR uptick in SaaS and "cloud computing" (whatever the hell that means these days) from Microsoft, but we will not be rid of a client OS from Microsoft in this lifetime.

Trivia ...

[Bob-taro]

"Midori" is Japanese for "green". It is also a common female first name.

I don't know how either would apply to an OS, unless it has some connection to this.

Re:And a drink

[dch24]

This is a transcript of MS Legal discussing a new name: (ok, it's a joke. laugh.)

SBalmer: Developers! We need a new chair, I mean a new name for the Vista code. It can't start with a V -- people already think virus with that. And it should go to eleven.

BSmith: Why don't we call it Door?

SBalmer: That's a good idea. But a web service should start with "my."

BSmith: Then call it MyDoor.

SBalmer: Web 2.0 starts with an 'i.' How do we add an 'i' to it?

BSmith: MiDoorI?

Assistant Paralegal to BSmith: Sir, that name is already trademarked.

SBalmer: Buy 'em out, boys.

Problem with this model: Windows is a hidden cost

[the_rev_matt]

For a significant number of people Windows is a hidden cost in the total price of buying a computer. They aren't used to having to pay for their OS directly and suddenly having to do so may prove to be a psychological barrier to a lot of them. Just something to consider.

Re:Huh?

[Reverend528]

or a flavor of linux

Melon-flavored linux.

Re:TLA conflict

[Red Flayer]

Perhaps some kind of fight to the death will resolve this.

Meh, it's a tie.

85 on the Bullshit Meter

[sexconker]

"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."

"Infoworld": +10
"days of Windows are numbered": +20
"web-based": +7
"code-named": +4
"microkernel": +4
"leverages" +8
"a technology called ..." + 10
"overcome": +7
"traditional": +5
"communications issues": +10

An 85 on the bullshit meter. Impressive!

Some confusion about Singularity / Midori

[argent]

With the ability today to run an OS, applications -- and even an entire PC desktop of applications -- in a virtual container using a hypervisor, the need to have the OS and applications installed natively on a PC is becoming less and less, said Brian Madden, an independent technology analyst.

Brian Madden is either talking about something else, or he's confused by references to hypervisors elsewhere. Midori will run under Hypervisors... but as one possible deployment of the OS, not as an essential part of the system. Singularity is more like ".NET" taken to the next level, with the entire OS running without hardware memory protection (let alone hypervisors), so it can run anywhere... even as a module inside another application... without any specific hardware support.

Duh

[commodoresloat]

If you're running your OS inside a web browser, what is the web browser running on?

emacs, of course.

Re:Could do it in BIOS, but stupid as hell to do s

[CopaceticOpus]

Oh yeah? Well, how about if it downloaded your OS at every bootup... twice?

Re:Wireless?

[spxero]

Maybe not in your business, but in my industry wireless is the only option. Between forklift operators, runners, and other misc. warehouse crew, there is no way to run cable.

We do have wired phones, wired servers, etc. But the core of the business is warehouse distribution, and in order to track product our warehouse employees need wireless.

Re:This is great news!

[Bobb Sledd]

No that can't be right. Pornstars are usually clean and cum with some form of protection.