Microsoft almost ditched Windows' spaghetti architecture for a cloud-based OS but mysteriously sent it to an early grave

[Windows Central]

In 2008, Microsoft started developing a new operating system codenamed 'Midori' that could potentially replace Windows but abandoned it in 2015. The company promised to integrate elements of the project across its tech stack.

Microsoft almost ditched Windows' spaghetti architecture for a cloud-based OS but mysteriously sent it to an early grave : Read more

 

[ShinyProton]

AFAIK, Midori was never meant to be a cloud-based OS. It was sure to be almost exclusively managed and verifiable. At one point, they did have their cloud-based speech recognition engine running off it and SQL Server - as a proof of concept.
Considering the incredibly severe fracture this OS would have brought to the existing ecosystem (although the existing Windows could have been virtualized in it), I still believe management got cold feet and shelved it forever. Which is another terrible mistake IMHO.

 

[HmmNoThatWasNotMe]

Ha ha Midori. I was working on the Windows divison when Midori was a thing. It was yet another Microsoft Research dead end project. It wasn't cloud-based, it was supposed to be "provably correct" code. So we'll futz around with a new language, new OS concepts, etc. It'll be cool, we'll write some academic papers about it.

Oh, this is costing a lot of money to pay the salaries of the people working on it? Oh, you want to "productize" MSR research, so it's not just a money sink?

Well then, instead of saying Midori is - charitably - a test bed for new OS concepts and languages - we shall say it's the "future of operating systems at Microsoft". You want backwards compat with Windows? Oh, sure. You want a new browser that's "provably correct"? Sure we can do that too, with a couple dozen people while the Windows division has 5000.

Nobody was scrapping the Windows OS in 2008. The Windows division was in the middle of Windows 7 development in 2008, and Win7 RTM'd on July 22 2009.

Midori fooled around with demos and the like for a while, then went away. It never got past proof-of-concepts and academic papers.

 

[TheFerrango]

Ha ha Midori. I was working on the Windows divison when Midori was a thing. It was yet another Microsoft Research dead end project. It wasn't cloud-based, it was supposed to be "provably correct" code. So we'll futz around with a new language, new OS concepts, etc. It'll be cool, we'll write some academic papers about it.

Oh, this is costing a lot of money to pay the salaries of the people working on it? Oh, you want to "productize" MSR research, so it's not just a money sink?

Well then, instead of saying Midori is - charitably - a test bed for new OS concepts and languages - we shall say it's the "future of operating systems at Microsoft". You want backwards compat with Windows? Oh, sure. You want a new browser that's "provably correct"? Sure we can do that too, with a couple dozen people while the Windows division has 5000.

Nobody was scrapping the Windows OS in 2008. The Windows division was in the middle of Windows 7 development in 2008, and Win7 RTM'd on July 22 2009.

Midori fooled around with demos and the like for a while, then went away. It never got past proof-of-concepts and academic papers.

Wasn't there a downloadable demo of the OS at some point? it was little more than a command prompt, but I recall something like that.

And yeah, cloud-based was definitely not in the MSR buzzword list