Midori could be anything from a complete dead-end, to the OS 95 percent of the world will be running in five to ten years. I suspect that the truth will lie somewhere in between; a future Microsoft OS will use virtualization to provide backwards compatibility, and that future OS will use managed code.

The plans, which are far from being finalized, indicate that Microsoft is really running scared of Mac OS and Linux on the desktop. According to one report, Microsoft’s main objective with Midori is a preemptive strike against non-Windows operating systems.

Midori, an offshoot of Microsoft Research’s Singularity OS, is a componentized, non-Windows OS that will take advantage of technologies developed since the advent of Windows and likely will be Internet-based, doing away with the need for locally installed applications.