From the Editors: Midori: The Empire's New Hope

By Systems Management News Team

August 15, 2008 —  We are delighted to hear that Microsoft Research is hard at work on a new operating system. Known as Midori, the new OS is a radical departure from the more-is-better Windows platform. If Midori appears in the form described in technical documents seen by SD Times and Systems Management News’ sister newspaper for software development managers, it will be exactly what many IT managers have been hoping for.

Windows is simply unprepared for a dangerous, tightly interconnected world. The original Windows New Technology code base came from a day when the only enterprise networks were slow LANs with few resources beyond shared printers. Today’s personal computers live in an entirely different world, with faster processors, tremendous quantities of memory, sophisticated applications, overlapping APIs, managed and unmanaged code, SOAs—and a very dangerous Internet. While Windows Vista presents a safer, more secure environment than its predecessors, only the most die-hard Microsoft apologists would argue that its incredible complexity represents the pinnacle of desktop operating system technology.

In the past, Microsoft has always made each version of Windows bigger, not smaller. The planned successor to Windows Vista, code-named Windows 7, continues that evolution. But just as the giant dinosaurs were eventually replaced by small mammals, so too we can hope that today’s overblown Windows platform can be replaced by a smaller, faster, leaner desktop OS that’s optimized for tomorrow’s computing challenges.

It’s too soon to speak about the evolutionary path from Windows to Midori (or something like Midori). There are many technical challenges that Microsoft still has to overcome. Customers and partners may balk at anything that affects compatibility with legacy hardware or software. Yet we have no doubt that this is the right direction for Microsoft to pursue. Indeed, in March 2006, BZ Media’s editorial director, Alan Zeichick, called upon Microsoft to develop an operating system along similar lines to Midori (see “Break With the Past”).

As the saying goes in Silicon Valley, if you don’t eat your own children, then someone else will. An operating system like Midori will displace Windows some day. It’s in Microsoft’s best interest to make sure that they deliver Midori—before someone else does.



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