It was interesting to see Microsoft’s plans for the next wave of operating systems, codenamed Midori. There’s a pretty positive write-up down at Software Development Times that goes into some detail as to what’s up their sleeve. There’s a pretty interesting historical backdrop which is:

Building Midori from the ground up to be connected underscores how much computing has changed since Microsoft’s engineers first designed Windows; there was no Internet as we understand it today, the PC was the user’s sole device and concurrency was a research topic.

Today, users move across multiple devices, consume and share resources remotely, and the applications that they use are a composite of local and remote components and services. To that end, Midori will focus on concurrency, both for distributed applications and local ones.

The rest of the article is pretty interesting technically, but there seems to be quite a bit more that people are reading into it. It seems apparent however, that the main driver is to push .Net down the operating system stack and make it even more pervasive, a strategy which could give Microsoft a toe-hold on other operating systems. There’s a great emphasis on cloud computing, with letting .Net decide on the granularity of your processing and how much power is needed. One thing’s for sure, it’s a pretty ambitious project, and could shape the future of how computers will be used, but it’s definitely not a short-term thing, it will be many years in the making.