Microsoft Working On "Post-Windows" Cloud Computing OS

Barence writes "Microsoft is working on a web-based operating system called Midori, as it looks to life beyond Windows. Midori is expected to be a cloud-computing service, and so not as dependent on hardware as current generations of Windows. It's also expected to run with a virtualization layer between the hardware and the OS, and is expected to be a commercial offshoot of the Singularity research project which Microsoft has been working on since 2003." If this story sounds familiar to you, it probably is.

I, for one...

...welcome our old software-as-a-service overlords.

This can only be a good thing

As apparently it comes with a dupe detector [slashdot.org] built in. Well if "well respected" journalists can claim things based on supposition and hope then surely I can as well?

Do you know what you are talking about?

so not as dependent on hardware as current generations of Windows. It's also expected to run with a virtualisation layer between the hardware and the OS,

You mean a kind of, say, Hardware Abstraction Layer [wikipedia.org]?

Yeah... they've been doing that kind of thing for over ten years.

Best "Cloud Computing OS" name:

Cloud 9!

too bad it's by definition vaporware.

Re:Best "Cloud Computing OS" name:

As is the screen.

So now

The operating system behavior with functions will be even more cloudy.

An application will reside somewhere in the cloud and it will be harder to realize if it is a legitimate application or if it is some malicious program.

Of course - there will be advantages too with an OS like that, especially for distributed computing problems.

Or as in the classic SF story with the question of "Does God exist?" - "Yes NOW there is a God" when all the computers in the net got connected. And the man trying to disable the connection got vaporized by a lightning.

Re:who's buying?

Who cares if they are relatively inefficient. Could a thin client browse the web, check email, play youtube videos? Sure! But why should I get my aging mother to buy a new one when her 3 year old PC is still doing just fine? What's the motivating factor? Not only will I have to motivate her to buy a new PC, but I'll also have to convince her to pay for a monthly service so that she can do all the same stuff she currently does for free. And all the documents that she has, many of which are sensitive in nature, are now going to be hosted on the internet. I'm failing to see why any post about cloud computing for consumers is tagged as anything other than "badidea;goodluckwiththat".

And for as 'relatively inefficient' as desktop PC's are, the network connection you rely on is significantly more inefficient. Sure, passing text blocks isn't a problem, even passing low resolution video only requires a few minutes of queuing. But have you ever tried playing a video game over remote desktop where instead of sending the data across the network you are sending full screen images? I'll give you a hint, even if the cloud computing is rendering 9000 frames per second, you'll be getting a max of 1 frame per second on a 19" monitor at a decent resolution.

And there in lies the rub, if you have a system that is powerful enough to play any modern graphics intensive video game, you have a machine that is more than capable of doing everything else the average consumer would do. Buying a new machine, OS, and dealing with all the pain and inconsistencies of depending on SaS is not a worth while investment.

Corporate use? Maybe. But consumer use? no way. This is not going to be the "next Windows".

-Rick

Re:who's buying?

I disagree.

The IT world has shifted from centralized to distributed computing and back again a number of times. Neither of which has truly dominated the entirety of the market. It is because each design has its own advantages and disadvantages.

The big disadvantages of the PC are it's price, maintenance, and 3rd party purchases. The price of PC's though, has plummeted over the last few years and longevity is increasing. Sans a monitor and printer, I can build a top end PC for under $500 today that would have been a $1000 endeavor 5 years ago, or a $2500 task in the late 90's. Maintenance is becoming easier and easier as AV software producers and MS have bundled automatic updates into the OS, so there is no more patching process, just click 'OK' and reboot once a month and you're set. 3rd party software is also relatively insignificant. Getting a full office suite is often a really cheap add on for buying a new PC, or if you want to save your pennies, OSS alternatives like Open Office will fulfill all your needs with out dropping a dime.

With those disadvantages largely nullified, it dramatically reduces consumer motivation to look for something new, something different, something that is going to require them to change their behavior or spending habits.

The disadvantages of a thin client granny machine still remain: Security, Contracts, Functionality. Since it's a thin client, all of your documents and data are stored somewhere else, which means at some point in time, someone, somewhere, other than you, is going to have access to them. Whether that person is an admin tech restoring a backup and poking around to make sure things restored correctly, a hacker looking for personal information, or an FBI agent with a warrant, it is a real threat. And depending on SaS, your data and services are only as good as the company behind the contract you signed. It was just last week that Yahoo pulled the plug on their SaS DRM music store, screwing all of their former customers out of the products they paid for. Imagine what would happen if your provider went bankrupt and downed the servers before you had a chance to get all of your tax documents stored locally? And there is still the existing limitation on functionality, because as you pointed out, there is no existing solution, nor is there any realistic solution on the horizon, to solve the bandwidth issue.

Cloud computing can work, but it is not for average consumers, nor wide spread use on the internet. There is no need for it there.

Software as a Service does have some basis for distribution to consumers, but largely it is just a way for incumbent software developers to lock in consumers so that they don't wind up running into issues like MS has with Office.

-Rick

horrible article

Why was this abortion of an article selected, when there is a better ars one here [arstechnica.com], and BBC here [bbc.co.uk]

Re:horrible article

You must be new here. Notice also that it's not only a dupe, but the summary says it's a dupe!

The "abortion of an article" was selected so it could be slashdotted, setting its host server on fire, and creating true cloud computing; clouds of smoke.

Which is what Microsoft's "cloud computing" vaporware is. They used to call these things "thin clients." Our mainframe at work served these workstations, which were dog slow, as many companies did. Departments bought "microcomputers" (PCs) to get away from the slow speed of the terminals and the stodgy IT people who didn't realise that their toys were tools that staff needed to get their jobs done.

It seems to have gone full circle.

another bad idea for consumers

Well, can't wait to pay for midori monthly, then office monthly, VS monthly, maybe media services monthly. MS will make 10 times the money they do now off software that you probably already have. Best part is every version that comes out we rush to get because we think it is going to be better.We haven't learned to use most of the functionality of the software version you are replacing.

The meaning of "Midori"

Perhaps a fluent Japanese speaker could confirm or deny, but I have been told that, although it is usually translated as "green", midori does not exactly correlate to the English word. (This is not unusual; the difference between "green" and "blue" is to some extent culturally determined as the two sets of cones in the eye have quite close spectral response peaks and the overlap region is therefore much less well defined than the red-green transition. Even in the British Isles, the word "glas", which is also vaguely cognote to "midori", has different color significance in Irish and Welsh.)

So: did someone in Microsoft just like the name, or is it a cunning way to express that they themselves don't quite know what this operating system is actually going to be? And is it time for anybody using the word in the US to get in a trademark application, just in case?

Re:

according to ja.wikipedia [google.com] it is pure green at mid lightness, or RGB (0, 128, 0)

And it will have WinFS...

Don't tell me, let me guess. It will have all the stuff Microsoft that was going to be in every version of Windows since Windows 95.

As the release date approaches, Microsoft will suddenly start echoing all the knocks critics have been making on Vista, saying it is insecure, difficult to use, presents a bad user experience and is generally a piece of junk which only fools would ever have purchased... but, fortunately, Midori will solve all these problems, and will include a Web-standards-compliant browser, an animated character that will pop up and give you only helpful advice and only when you actually need it, WinFS, and Duke Nukem Forever.

And if you believe them, then you'd believe that Lucy will finally let Charlie Brown kick the football.

De-MarketSpeak translation of Microsoft"'s" "SIP"

The following is copied from my journal. It's a comment concerning the microkernel protection mechanisms of Midori which was intended to be posted in the previous story, but unfortunately I modded that one. This time, dupes actually help ;) :

"SIP", or "Software isolated processes" is just MS marketing hype speak for what is known as a Language-based system [wikipedia.org] in which seperate processes can be isolated from one another without paging or other hardware protection mechanisms. This is done using the semantics of the language in which the processes are programmed which excludes any possibility of one process intruding into the address space of another.

One example of a similar OS would be Bell Labs' Inferno. ( thanks to Knots for pointing this out ) Also, there's JX, which is an open-source microkernel based operating system in which the (micro)kernel and the applications are written in Java and run under a modified version of the JVM.

jdb2

Real Innovation, from MS?

Yeah, it's MS, but before jumping completely on the stomp-it-dead bandwagon, I'd say this: We thought Apple was dead once too. If MS can do some real innovation here, and bring a new paradigm to an operating system, we'll be lucky. Innovation never hurt anyone, and it may come when you least expect it. If Apple can pull off a 180, so can Microsoft.

Re:Real Innovation, from MS?

If Apple can pull off a 180, so can Microsoft.

There's a difference. Apple had a visionary at the helm when it turned around, in particular the second coming of Steve Jobs (love or hate the guy, you have to admit he has vision). Having a visionary is important for turning around a big company because they have to fight off the corporate goons that drown every decent idea in marketing nonsense and bureacracy. For Microsoft, Bill Gates has been decreasing his role at MS for some time now. Do you see any other visionaries at Microsoft?

That said, to point out a counter-example,IBM seems to have changed its tune as well without some sort of outspoken visionary.

It's official...

...Microsoft now officially has its head in the clouds.

Old school Microsoft bashers will, of course, recognize this as Microsoft's tried-and-true strategy of preannouncing vaporware in order to freeze the market. Buyers put their plans on hold and wait for Microsoft's product to emerge, effectively killing the competition, even though the competition has non-vapor products on the market today.

Does anyone even remotely think that the vaporware strategy will work this time? Cloud computing is all about the elasticity of computing resources. It's a natural fit for unlicensed operating systems. Microsoft's entire business is built around per-unit software licensing. Anyone who's been around an IT shop that uses Microsoft products knows that keeping track of licenses is practically a full time job. Add in the elasticity of cloud computing and it becomes pretty much impossible.

I'd even go as far as saying that cloud computing is fundamentally incompatible with Windows.

Microsoft's wierd mania for virtual machines

First .NET, now this. Why Microsoft's mania for virtual machines, considering they only support x86 targets? Microsoft at one point supported NT for PowerPC, MIPS, Alpha, and x86, and that was with hard-compiled code. So it's not about portability. It seemed to be more like Microsoft's answer to Java - if Sun was succeeding in that market, Microsoft had to go there too.

Rather than trying to use software-separated processes, it would be more useful to improve message passing so that hardware-separated processes could talk to each other better. This, by the way, is one of the big weaknesses of the UNIX/Linux world. In UNIX/Linux, interprocess communication sucks. What you usually want is an interprocess subroutine call, or "synchronous message-oriented interprocess communication". What UNIX and Linux give you are pipes (one way, stream-oriented, asynchronous), sockets (two way, stream oriented, excessive overhead, asynchronous), System V IPC (used by nobody, message oriented, two way, asynchronous), and shared memory (unsafe, one process can crash another). There's no safe, synchronous message passing system. You can build one atop the existing mechanism, but there's a big performance penalty. The result is huge, monolithic applications, or systems that use "plug-ins" that can crash the entire application (i.e. Apache). Fast message passing has a bad history in the UNIX world, due to the Mach debacle, but it works fine in QNX, IBM VM, and hypervisors like Xen. (Windows has fast message passing, although for historical reasons in the 16-bit era it's somewhat clunky and too tied to the windowing system.)

Windows at least has a standardized approach to message passing. The UNIX/Linux world does not. This leads to a proliferation of mechanisms for doing the same thing. Both KDE and OpenOffice use CORBA for message passing, but they don't use compatible versions of it.

Implement from scratch, new bugs unfold

Don't they realize that implementing something from scratch, much less something this complex, undoes all of the security and other bug fixes found by hundreds of people over more than a decade (not to mention invalidating the experience of thousands of people with established systems)? They're guaranteed to end up with something that has unknown quirks, and that's after it's released to market years later than it's supposed to be.

I'll allow that Microsoft is capable of good ideas. But they'd be much smarter to build on solid foundations and just bring the good ideas to market.

Re:

va chier !!

Re:Not as dependent on hardware...

I, personally, think they are digging their own grave with this one.

There just isn't enough bandwidth everywhere for there to be a totally online OS.

Re:Not as dependent on hardware...

Yes there is, the difference is, it can't be written by MS. A small team of hackers could probably code a decent OS that is web based, but as MS has shown us, they are incapable of coding for the present generation of hardware, so the OS they make won't be usable until everyone has 50 MB/Second connections.

Re:

Microsoft is working on a new OS that will never see the light of day because it will risk the monopolistic platform to which they now enjoy...

No, they are working on a new OS in order to continue the monopoly they now enjoy. If the paradigm of cloud computing becomes the reality, then they are fucked if they continue with their current business model.

Re:

Midori is a code name, meaning it won't be named that when it's released. It's a pretty common word, as it means "Green" in Japanese. It's also the name of a common Melon Liquer. Chill out, not everything they do is evil, it's just a name.