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Microsoft To Release Cloud-Oriented Windows OS
CWmike writes "Within a month, Microsoft will unveil what CEO Steve Ballmer called 'Windows Cloud.' The operating system, which will likely have a different name, is intended for developers writing cloud-computing applications, said Ballmer, who spoke to an auditorium of IT managers at a Microsoft-sponsored conference in London. Ballmer was short on details, saying more information would spoil the announcement. Windows Cloud is a separate project from Windows 7, the operating system that Microsoft is developing to succeed Windows Vista."
I suspect you're closer than you think.
Some time ago, rumour had it that Microsoft had allocated ~300 of its best engineers to work on Midori, a product based on its Singularity research OS.
Singularity, for those not familiar with it, is a highly impressive piece of work. It's not actually Windows at all, in fact it bears absolutely no resemblence to any existing OS architecturally and didn't even support graphics when we were last able to look at it. But it was a ground-up fresh new OS that had the following characteristics: entirely .NET based (with extensions), extremely robust and extremely high performance.
In particular, Singularity is able to go about 30% faster on I/O intensive apps than traditional server operating systems like Linux and Windows because it doesn't use hardware process isolation, but rather does everything in software. Hmmm, an OS with no graphics support, no applications, but which can run .NET applications far faster than the competition. Sounds basically ideal for a server OS or "cloud windows" if you ask me.