There is a time when the Internet is taking on the role of the PC operating system, the day when the Microsoft Windows client OS as it has been developed for the past 20-odd years becomes obsolete.

It seems that Microsoft has prepared itself for the day when its OS becomes obsolete with its incubation project code-named Midori that seeks to create a componentized, non-Windows OS, which will take improvement of technologies not available when Windows first was conceived.

Although Microsoft has not given any comment publicly on what Midori is, the company has confirmed that it exists. According to several reports over the Internet, Microsoft has gone much further than that. In addition, the report describes Midori as an Internet-centric OS, an OS based on the idea of connected systems, that largely eliminates the dependencies between local applications and the hardware they run on that exist with a typical OS today. Moreover, the report claims Midori is an offshoot of Microsoft Research’s Singularity OS that creates “software-isolated processes”, an OS that can reduce the dependencies between individual applications, and between the applications and the OS itself.

According to Brian Madden, an independent technology analyst, with nowadays technology that available to run an OS, applications, and even an entire PC desktop of applications in a virtual container using a hypervisor, the need to have the applications and OS installed natively on a PC is becoming less and less. Moreover, he said that a future OS could actually be a hypervisor itself, with applications virtual containers running on top of it that could be transferred easily to other stuffs because they do not have client-side dependencies to each other.

Madden has no information about Midori beyond the published reports, he said descriptions of it as an Internet-centric system that provides an overall “connectedness” between stuffs and applications makes sense for the future of cloud computing and on-demand services. It seems that Microsoft has predicted the need for such computing system although the actual technology is still five or more years out. Moreover, Microsoft has been preparing for the day when people acknowledge that they do not need Windows anymore and thinking about what they will do to remain relevant.

Microsoft has put many efforts with its virtualization strategy that based on its new Hyper-V hypervisor, beyond merely virtualizing the server OS. Microsoft has also been moving full steam ahead with strategies to virtualize applications and the desktop OS as well. The idea of using virtualization in these scenarios is to reduce or even to eliminate the problems of application compatibility, which are still giving headaches to Vista users, and that have made the OS a liability rather than a boon for some Windows enterprise customers and power users.

According to Andrew Brust, chief of new technology for the consulting firm Twentysix New York, If Microsoft’s Midori is close to what people think it is, and then it will represent a “huge paradigm shift” for Windows users. This is not an easy homework for Microsoft to pull off. In addition, he said that the challenges to an OS like Midori would be both technological complexities and the “sobering compromises” that must be made when a product migrates from being a research project into commercialization.

Brust said the idea of developing Midori where makes sense because Microsoft needs to update its Windows dramatically to stay current with computing paradigms and new business models that exist nowadays, particularly to help the company compete against Google on the Web. Moreover, Brust said, “Breaking with the legacy of a product that first shipped 23 years ago seems wholly necessary in terms of keeping the product manageable and in sync with computing’s state of the art“. Midori is a necessary project to be run by Microsoft to survive on its business as its initiatives around Internet search, advertising and cloud computing offerings.

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