Midori is related to Singularity, a research project that dates back to 2003 and is basically a look at how one might architect an operating system from the ground up, given what we know now about computing and where things are headed in terms of parallelism and cloud computing. Longtime Microsoft engineer Eric Rudder is the one leading up the Midori effort.

Whereas Singularity was a research effort firmly confined to a small team of researchers inside Microsoft’s in-house labs, Midori is an effort to see if there is something commercially viable that could come out of it, though it could be years off and come in pieces if it comes at all.

The one public mention I found to Midori was within a research paper on a bug-finding program called Chess. On one PowerPoint slide, it mentions a list of “current Chess applications” of which one bullet point is “Singularity/Midori (OS in managed code).”

That syncs with the SDTimes report, which talks about Midori as an OS for the age in which computing resources can be either local or in the Internet cloud and in which processing tasks can be split among multiple processors and multiple machines.

It’s worth noting that Microsoft often has incubation projects that seek to explore whether an all-new approach to a product might be justified. That said, up to this point, every update to Office and Windows has been some type of incremental improvement, not a ground-up rewrite.

Back in 2000, the company had an effort called NetDocs that many thought might replace Office with an online productivity suite. Eight years–and at least three Office versions later–people are still wondering when we will see such a product from Redmond.

That suggests to me that the arrival of Midori or some similar approach as a Windows successor is something that is a long way off, if it ever happens.

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