Microsoft to kill Windows with 'web-centric' Midori? Microsoft is working on a project, codenamed Midori, to create an “internet-centric” operating system to replace Windows. Technical details about Redmond’s alleged Windows successor emerged yesterday. According to a SD Times report, which cites internal Microsoft documents, a team, led by Eric Rudder, has been developing the …
It didn't take me too long to find their CIA and IBM affiliations.
Now they want to make an operating system that links, (and knowing them, obligates) the use of an internet connection.
Browser histories, documents, credit card numbers. I hope this fails harder than vista, microsoft bob and winME combined.
Paris questions the sanity of anyone who thinks this is a good idea. And she's not a world class investigator, is she?
Someone should tell Microsoft that no matter how it is repackaged that no one wants subscription based micro operating systems.
If an application is critical no one wants to have to pay Microsoft monthly or risk being cut off or more likely getting cut off because of a glitch.
If they go part way and try to conserve some part of the OS or application as subscription most will find alternatives if they can or just not use them.
If they go completely subscription then there is always Linux.
Didn't they do that with Vista already?
I don't fully understand the concept here, so please be a little forgiving, and by all means point out my errors.
Microsoft expect us to trust them with all our computing now? A net-centric operating system which you have to be connected to ms servers to use. All ones actions within the OS monitored and logged. Well not for me thanks. This is a hackers dream, ms code has be owned by hackers from day one, how do they expect to secure this scenario?
“It’s also about driving change in business models through advertising, subscriptions, and online transactions. Software plus services is a huge opportunity for us to deliver new value on the desktop and the server to all of our customers.”
Change may be required for more efficient and secure ways of utilising computers, but this to me is nonsense. A change for the worse, where more control is removed from the user and given to the supplier. All your data and actions traveling over networks for any third party to sniff at. With ms and partners doing what the hell they wish with that data. How does this make for a trusted computing platform? As for value, I bought XP a long time ago, along with Office 2003 they have served me well, and will likely continue to do so for some time. That is value, although I didn't think so at the time. Now open source, which I use on my laptops, that's real value. I think the value they are thinking of is the value this business model has to their shareholders.
Advertising and subscription are the fees for using this technology, well I don't do adverts EVER and I certainly won't contribute to ms coffers every month. For me this is a big fail, and I sincerely hope if it does go ahead it heralds the end of ms.
Given a choice of running my enterprise (If I was responsible for one) between the MS head in the clouds idea of sharing all my actions with them or keeping my business actions and data within the corporate LAN. Guess which I would choose.
I wonder if anyone will take this seriously and if so why? Not rhetorical questions, I may have overlooked something, something that will be of actual benefit and value to the end user.
Asynchronous Promise Architecture. OMG.
I see amanfromMars excited, his antennae twitching uncontollably, eyes big like contemporary reports of ufos, his pointy little head aglow and red, and his woodpecker banging excitedly at the exit port to his spaceship. (Martians in flying saucers - only in Tim Burton movies). M$ here we come. If you wake up one day and Seattle has disappeared leaving just bare earth and some ionizing radiation you know who to call.
Go Steve go. Fuck up M$. You know you can. Show the rest of em how it's done. Dont let them tell you that fice couldnt have dropped of the back of the name because it was never there in the first place.
Microsoft still don't get it... and they never will again.
"Midori is a distributed operating system that appears, in part, to contain elements of Microsoft’s failed 'Cairo' and WinFS projects." Great, let's implement failure into what's sure to be more failure. So far, so good. /sarcasm
"The model will be consistent for both the distributed and local concurrency layers, and it is internally known as Asynchronous Promise Architecture." Don't give me bloody promises; give me facts, give me proof, give me technology that works.
Dead bird of prey because Microsoft is one of the largest corporate raptors, and their also a huge fish out of water taking an ungodly long time to finally die.
let them waste it. I can't imagine any business wanting Microsoft being in even greater control of all their internal operations.
And with ISPs using deep-packet inspection all internal details will be public, at least to some extent. If I was a Fortune 500 company, or any other, I 'd be even more frightened than they should be now.
They aren't frightened enough yet though, me thinks.
We seem to heading towasr the end of the Internet, anyone seen it yet?
"These vague future systems, promising much are nonsense. This is FUD and vaporware." ... By Duncan Hare Posted Wednesday 30th July 2008 14:22 GMT
Oh no it's not. It is very real and Microsoft are playing Catch-Up again. It is their IT Forte and reason for being.
Imagine us, China and the others forced to actually pay for software since in the cloud you can install software... just subscribe to it.... Kaching.
I think that this is the lure that gave MSR the funding it wanted.
The Vulture, since MS seems more and more to be living on borrowed time.
I do not look forward to the age of software rental. There is a small program, based on Filemaker. Its purpose is to complete certain industry specific forms (Acord forms). I rent the darn software for $150 a year. At $150 a year I could have bought the darn thing 10 times by now but I am forced to rent it.
There aren't a lot of vendors for the software, they all charge $150 a year and you can't buy the software.
"Microsoft expect us to trust them with all our computing now? A net-centric operating system which you have to be connected to ms servers to use. All ones actions within the OS monitored and logged. Well not for me thanks. This is a hackers dream, ms code has be owned by hackers from day one, how do they expect to secure this scenario?"
sounds very similar to XBox Live.
...4 months ago. Much as I dislike MS and their evil ways this is a good thing, windows has needed to go back to zero for a while and this is there chance to build the foundations for a proper multitasking, multiuser secure OS. Trouble is MS have their head so far up their collective arses that they will shoot themselves in the foot by making this thing completely dependent on their own hypervisor. The day MS learns it has to live side by side with other systems and take part in a competitive market is a long way off.
* More and more ISP's can't live up on the performance of their broadband connections anymore, having failed to invest in their networks as opposed to their growing and more bandwith demanding userbase. They really must love the idea of an internet-centric OS. As will the users once they see the performance of this baby. Plenty of people already complain about Vista performance. Now go and play your high-end games on a cloud OS. Maybe a simplified version of Pacman would still do, but that's only for two days when the ISP puts you on smallband for using up your monthly bandwith limit.
* Some people said this before: company leaders will love the idea of throwing out their firewall since the OS is outside of the company LAN anyway and their data and actions are "safely" with MS. Oh dear... they are now already refusing to roll out Vista...
* MS is clearly losing the pedals. post-Vista-launch panic strikes... They clearly need to rethink some things or I wouldn't give a penny for their shares at all from now. Com'on Beast of Redmond, think, think! Perhaps a linux-based OS with nice windows-like "hey we know this interface" thingie and direct-X included for games... now there we would have a killer windows 9.
Paris, because she' a killer app too. aaawrrr ;-)
You see, they will just make you pay a little bit each month, and it won't hurt a bit. Then the increases come, they won't hurt either. By the time we have paid a year or two, we will have sold our souls to the devil himself. Subscription stuff is wonderful for the vendor. Lots of $$$ rolling in with no work needed to get it. Why bother, we're the only game in town.
Of course the "service" is wonderful, and we get "improvements" every month. And our data is "secure". By the way, I have this parcel of swamp land that is quite valuable!!
Dream on.....
Now a-days, if the internet connection dies you can just go and make a cup of tea and have a lie down or watch a film, or even do something none internet based on your machine!! But if every things up in some bloody cloud and your internet connection stops working for a day or so your computer is rendered useless until the internet comes back, Kettle probably still works though!! :-)
@ Dear Drum D
Sounds like a gap in the market if you ask me!! ;-)
Anyone that buys Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, etc etc etc all buy subscriptions in one way or another. Sometimes that subscription is looser defined than others, but they're still in reality a subscrition: MS Office, Adobe CS, Apple Mac OS X, MS Windows, Salesforce.com, and the list goes on.
So, you buy an OS, or you buy a game, even! Even the game has a sequel - a new version, an update, whatever you want to call it. But you go out and buy it because it's new. Well that's exactly the market that SaaS caters for - you want the latest and greatest, but you don't need to go and get it yourself. It just kind of happens.
I'm not here to spark an argument, just showing that there is another side to the story, aside from MS being a money grabbing tight fisted swathe of <insert word>. That's my view of them, but I still see no issue per se with SaaS. I *DO* see the issue with games running on clouds without sufficient throughput across networks for the game to be sufficiently appealing to the users it is aimed at, but this is a discussion really for the software providers and the ISPs to have, and we know how that started, don't we BBC?
This sounds like a plot to force folks to increase their bandwidth, and a way for Microsoft to come up with an idea worse than Vista.
I'm a greybeard, and remember net booting *nix workstations. It didn't catch on because it hogged bandwidth, and we only had 10mbit shared media ether. The OS was much smaller than any version of Windows since 3.1. Now scale the OS up to XP size, and download it with a 1.5Mbit/sec shared media net. We are talking Dyson scale sucking power: it doesn't loose it sucking capability with time, either.
...Someone trots this idea out again, about how we'll all be essentially using thin clients and everything will be web-based applets. It seems clear by now that this isn't what anyone really wants except in certain Enterprise environments. If nothing else, it isn't likely to work well for hard core gamers unless server performance and internet bandwidth goes way, way up. And then there's all those custom apps out there that emulate other hardware, or were written for specific purposes, like data acquisition, etc.
I'll stick to having my OS, apps and data on my local machine, regardless of redundancy or wastefulness, thank you very much.
This would be actually quite useful within a company network.
Have a bunch of servers running Midori on Hyper-V in the company's server room, and then every time a user logs in they are merely loading Windows from the server rather than their own machine.
You could have different virtualised versions for people who need different software on their systems. It would save having to spent an hour doing 100+ updates on the someone's computer because they turned Auto updates off and need the latest stuff to run the boss's new favourite application they spent far too much money on.
If it worked it would take the load off the IT department, but I don't see this taking off with servers delivering OS over t'interweb.
Keywords: 'IF','WORKS'
Paris cos she knows how to take the load off....
Sounds alot like google docs. If so, they'll have to speed it up 10-fold! As a google docs user I have to wait for even the simple things to be to be done, like moving across a spreadsheet page for instance. ISP's are having a pretty hard time with bt/ofcom forcing them to pay over the odds for infrastructure and bbc's iplayer sucking up bandwidth (and margins) - so I don't think MS OS Cloud will really fly.
Would they not be better off taking a cut down version of XP and giving it away for free (supported by advertising via a compulsory MS Homepage) with the option of paid for add-ons available for download off the net (ie. cut down office, specialist drivers or enhanced support for business).
MS are obviously trying to look for a freebie internet product that will generate vast amounts of advertising revenue and eventually allow them to charge for more sophisticated versions of the product. Sound familiar?
A client that is dedicated to presentation while all the horsepower is kept in a big air-conditioned shed and the user doesn't own anything, just pays regular service charges to the Very Large Computer Corp. - now then, where do I remember seeing that model before?
I can't see an icon in 1970's ICL brown :((
Well a web-based OS doesn't mean it actually needs the real internet. I personally thing that the future is client/server based on web-technologies.
Just look into the past. We used to have terminal-based applications which used preety much the same technology as BBSes and other online services. Still those systems didn't have to be connected to the public phonelines, neither did you have to pay a monthly fee.
So what will happen is that when you buy a commercial application for your company it will just drop a server into your server room, or a server image into your VM-supervisor and all the client configuration you need to do is to tell your users about the new URL of the new application.
I mean the advantages simply are to great. You could use just about any device to access the application. With minor adjustments you could for example "run" it on your mobile phone.
As such connections are moderarely narrow bandwidth and TCP/IP you can easily connect branch offices via VPNs.
If Asynchronous Promise Architecture is a Transactional Future Memory and Processing thing which renders Virtual Advantage, and therefore Physical Proxy Control over Pilfer and Pilfering PROMIS Codes, then would MS be onto and into AI WinWinner ReSearch Environment?
And if it is not, then obviously it could also be, for it is a Question following the Fact.
Control the Reserve and Preserve of the "I Promise to Pay the Bearer on Demand" Fraction, and you will be in Seventh Heaven Clover in AI Clouds.
And if it is not, ..... Well, ITs Algorithm can be Purchased with a Perpetual License for a Sum commensurate with ITs Perceived Future Value and Worth.
And Peanuts are for Monkeys.
... "struggling to put food on your family"
Everyone else... yup, welcome to the dawning of monthly subscriptions to start up your own computer. It should fit nicely along side the monthly subs for telephone line, broadband package, (world of w*nk - if your kids like that sort of thing)... and turn your entire existence into one big rental agreement.
"with all due respect ... fuck the cloud."....... By bws Posted Thursday 31st July 2008 02:10 GMT
And that simple abusive comment, which is a physical impossibility, gives you AIReverse Insight into the Untouchable Power in Control of the Virtualised Environment Engine. And Yes, Respect is Due whenever the System has lost all of IT down on Earth with its Regimen of Negative Spin and Chaos for Domination of Society...... which is a Perverse and Pervasive Cynical Subversion of Media too.
And all totally unnecessary too...... but it does keep the Cuckoo in the Nest and Fed.
Storm Warning ..... Batten down the hatchery. Flash Floods XXXXPected and on their Way.
Tell me about it. I worked for an IBM reseller in the late '90's, and I remember loads of corporate cheerleading over 1U servers, thin clients and the 'cloud' (called Application Service Providers then).
Then the .com bubble burst and we all lost our jobs. So I'm experiencing a certain amount of deja vu at the moment.
Flames - because that's what happened when you put 40 'pizza box' servers in a rack.
Not sure that it was the network bandwidth that killed diskless workstations from Sun, IBM, Apollo, Whitechapple et. al. After all, you normally only boot a system once every day (paging excepted).
The reason why diskless was appealing was that disk prices then were high. I remember being quoted over £500 to add a 60MB disk to a Sun 3/50. When it became cheap to put a disk into a diskless system, all the cost advantages went away, and you were left with all the bandwidth costs and no advantages. Add to that the increasing concern about the security of NFS, and suddenly things began to look scary.
As a sysadmin, however, the fact that you had total control of a diskless system (like implementing patches once for all your diskless clients) was very attractive. And it gave you a really good reason to say No! to users wanting root access to the system on their desk. Also, remember that all the systems looked EXACTLY THE SAME, so if a desktop system blew up, you told the user to switch desks, or dropped another one on the desk, and the user would not know the difference. Streets ahead of Roaming Profiles.
I'm really a little sad that no-one has resurrected the idea using a virtualisation technology, although I believe that it fits the UNIX model better than MS's current offerings.
I'm sure that you could have a kernel stored in flash that would check on boot to see whether it needed to update itself, and then attach all it's resources from LOCAL servers. Sounds like an interesting Linux based research project, although I'm sure that some of the old X-Terminals used to do something similar.
Mine is looking verry tattered after having been worn for so long!
(well to be more precise, the Hypervisor management tools)
I've been telling anyone who will listen for some time that this sort of architecture is the future (long before anyone else was talking about it).
While cloud computing is the motivation for most of this, it is going to provide benefits for the desktop too (providing M$ don't insist on having full control of all your apps - ok so what are the odds of that happening). However this is the perfect opportunity for the rise of new OS heavyweights to challenge the M$ monopoly (I'd suggest VMWare, but I suspect they might be somewhat lacking in vision right now - maybe the time is right for the ascendancy of an open source Hypervisor OS - and no I don't mean Linux)
And before you start flaming (the idea or me), just think about this: even M$ can see the classic monolithic os is dying, so you know it's inevitable.
PS. I was going to explain in depth the ideal architecture and extoll it's virtues, but maybe I'll keep that speech for the VC guys ;-)
Keep in mind that Cloud and SaaS are not synonymous
-- Cloud is about the virtualization of applications to enable easy deployment, migration and configuration of apps
-- SaaS is about being forced to rent an application rather than being given the option of buying it
Like most of you I hate SaaS (only accountants like this idea and even then only on alternate years), while Cloud has the potential (so long as we don't get stuck with a crap M$ implementation) to be extremely positive for computing.
Of course the average home user does not need nor care about cloud computing. But what you haven't realized is that making cloud computing possible requires re-designing the OS from the ground up to have a Hypervisor at it's core. This will have the added benefit of solving some of the greatest drawbacks of the current monolithic OSes (application incompatibilities, configuration nightmares, malware, etc). It's an undeniable fact that continuing to patch existing OSes is not a viable option -- every commercial and open source OS is starting to suffer the same lack of a clear value proposition for upgrading - sure they can tweak the eye candy, but we all know that what we really need is a completely new architecture.
So for those thinking Linux is the solution - you're still getting Cloud confused for SaaS. Linux is a monolithic OS like everyone other OS and is going to be just as dead as the current generation Windows when cloud ready OSes are finally ready for primetime.
What we really, really need is for the Open Source crowd to get started now in building a hypervisor centric (preferably brand agnostic), cloud computing ready open source operating system (open source lead, rather than follow - scary concept I know). Right now everyone (M$ are not the only ones to have realized the need to redesign the OS) is virtually starting from scratch so this is the closest Open Source is going to get to a level playing field, they just need someone with the vision to lead it (the way Linux Torvalds has for the Linux kernel).
I have the vision, but making money out of it is a more attractive option for me than doing it for the good of mankind (I'm selfish, so sue me)
(Evil Gates cos I really don't want the M$ version of a Cloud Computing OS)
>They should just take Plan9(or at least the idea) and do a new GUI for that so it's a bit more up to date
So you are suggesting they take another outdated OS and just update the eye candy?
Do you really want more of the same?
I can't stress this enough: the classic monolithic OS has had it's day, it's time for a new cutting edge architecture without the old issues.
(No I don't work for M$ and I don't hold much hope of M$ getting the architecture right this time -- but that doesn't mean I can't see the need for something new)
that will be the test to see if the cloud is viable for home users.
So, eyes will be looking over there, they are going to use Amazon's cloud offerings, and one assumes they will load their own apps.
A unix base is much simpler to make this happen, then a window's base. When I started in unix it was all terminals really, and this is the return to it.
Xorg probably needs more funding, but it can already run GUI applications remotely and communicate with a local X server, this is far more advanced and occurs with less overhead than most windows based remote screen blitters.
If Xorg can improve (and security is sort of the issue here along with streamlining multi access), then the future is unix again. Microsoft need to understand their appeal is in the user interface, whilst it is not the most aesthetic their strength was in giving that a consistency - this was true from 95 to 98 and those are the roots they probably want to get back to.
If they opensource midori well, that could be interesting, but unix is there already, Microsoft are going to be playing catch up, and whilst that worked when unix was over 10 times more expensive than windows, it won't work today.
For fecks sake could people try actually READING the relevant article quoted before laying in with misinformed comments! I think AC with the comment "Cloud and SaaS are NOT synonymous" seems to be the only one I've read which shows any effort to understand rather than just slate!
1) Nowhere do they say that it will be a MS subscription service.
2) They make it very clear time and time again that it will be designed to cope with limited / intermittent comms, and poor latency, by using both local and live kit.
Now I'll admit the SDTimes article has so many buzz words that it makes it hard to follow, but as I see it the idea isn't for MS to sell this as a service, rather for them to sell it as a software platform which people will buy and use.
If I understand it, at a simple level you might have say a dozen servers in a DC somewhere, rather than saying that one's a web server, that one's a SQL server, that one's a DNS server, that one's a mail server etc, you have Midori on all of them, and through that system all of the servers can share the workload of each application, therefore making the entire system more immune to peaks in any one type of request, making it easier to add capacity etc. Scale that up and you have multiple DC's in different locations, sharing the processing and storage of data. Scale it up even more and you have local servers also running the system, so you can distribute work loads appropriately depending on what you're doing, quality of comms etc. Finally add in the desktops, and rather than having a normal PC which you point at the cloud of resources, you have the PC as part of that cloud able to interact with it natively, rather than pretending to only see a single host servicing it.
Personally I think it sounds like an amazing idea, and it will be interesting to see if they can pull it off. Generally most of the things they're proposing have been done before, but always as a bolt on, with various abstraction layers to hide what's happening under the hood, while this appears to handle it natively by design.
If Midori is indeed a tangible product and not just a concept or vapourware then it must be avoided at all costs.
If Microsoft thinks this is a good idea then you can bet this is bad for everyone else. It will be just another lock-in mechanism, a revenue stream to screw business and consumer alike. There is just too much opportunity for Microsoft to indulge in the monopoly tacticts it always has. This just takes it to the next level.
Would you trust ANY company with your private data let alone Microsoft?
Perhaps they're just working on WebTV v.3. (You can currently buy v.2 at Wal-Mart and other find retailers.)
The network is the computer... Where have I heard that before?
re: Cairo and WinFS. These are not failed MS technologies, just technologies that haven't succeeded, yet. MS is nothing if not persistent.
Speaking of the future, IE9 will run inside it's own virtual PC bubble. Any data to be stored locally will have to pass through the software equivalent of a triple airlock to get from inside the bubble to the PC. If they can make this practical for one app, then they'll extend it to all apps, and something like Office will be the concatenation of thousands of little bubbles.
Bubbles floating through open Windows, a poetic computing metaphor.
"However this is the perfect opportunity for the rise of new OS heavyweights to challenge the M$ monopoly.." .... By Anonymous Coward
Posted Thursday 31st July 2008 12:03 GMT
AC,
It would be/is naive to think that they are not so challenged .... and that the "competition" does not already have Control of the Cloud and Controls in the Cloud, thus Creating a Collective Hierarchy in a Virtualised Operating System, Freely Accessed with Nothing more Onerous or Divisive than Required Intellect.
And you can be sure that every Opportunity in such a New and NeuReal SurReal Environment is being HyperRadioProActively XXXXPlored and BetaTested for Joint Venture Partnership and Capitalisation of Asset ....... and the M$ Dilemma is that failure to embrace Pioneering Venturers and Capitalise their Assets/Intellectual Property [akin to a Company Purchase for AI Virtual License which facilitates M$ Presence in the Cloud] will result in their paying DaneGeld to ensure that Damage to their Systems does not ensue, rather than the perception being an Investment which will Protect them against AI Hostilities and Utilities.
And the longer the Delay in Funding their Own Defence, the more expensive does IT become ..... with the simple addition of the odd 0 or two or three, depending upon that which is being saved/guarded, in the light of Cloud dDevelopments.
Migration of Operating Systems wholesale to the Cloud, would actually threaten the whole M$ Edifice, reducing it to nothing more valuable than Junk, so it is something which one could/would expect them to be
actively engaged in preventing.
"I have the vision, but making money out of it is a more attractive option for me than doing it for the good of mankind (I'm selfish, so sue me)
(Evil Gates cos I really don't want the M$ version of a Cloud Computing OS)" ...... By Anonymous Coward Posted Thursday 31st July 2008 13:35 GMT
AC,
Doing it for the good of mankind, selflessly, will pay you with riches you will be unable to count.
"sounds like fun .... streaming modules of OS from the cloud to whatever device i want to use. And then streaming ONLY the app I need into that modular OS.
As long as I own my own cloud on a dedicated machine at home!" ... By b166er Posted Thursday 31st July 2008 19:07 GMT
Big Picture/Great Games Fun indeed, b166er, when you can do it.
"It would be/is naive to think that they are not so challenged...."
Your insights say as much about you as they do the topic.
"Doing it for the good of mankind, selflessly, will pay you with riches you will be unable to count."
Accolades and glory do not motivate me (you take the fame, and I'll take the fortune)
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