My former colleague at BetaNews David Worthington has a scoop on the upcoming version of Windows over at his (fairly) new gig at SD Times. David claims that the new operating system, code named “Midori,” is being built completely from scratch and has no relation to the current Windows codebase at all.

This is huge. It essentially equates to an admission by Microsoft that Windows is indeed no longer working. To Microsoft, this project is important enough that Eric Rudder, senior vice president for technical strategy at Microsoft has been put in charge of it.

Midori is said to be internet centric, although it appears that it would attempt to at least support some legacy Windows applications. Such interoperability is almost a necessity as a switch from Windows to another platform would be on a scale infinitely bigger than Apple’s switch from the Mac OS 9 codebase to Mac OS X.

It also looks to take advantage of emerging technologies in computing, according to David’s reporting:

The Midori documents foresee applications running across a multitude of topologies, ranging from client-server and multi-tier deployments to peer-to-peer at the edge, and in the cloud data center. Those topologies form a heterogeneous mesh where capabilities can exist at separate places.

What I’m not clear here yet on is whether or not Microsoft is planning an entire sea-change as far as UI goes — where our perception of what a Windows OS is now is completely thrown out the window. The report seems to suggest in some way that a complete overhaul could be in the cards:

At the presentation layer, Microsoft is making a clean break from the existing Windows GUI model, where applications must update their display on one and only one thread at a time, and the associated problems that affect OS stability and make it more difficult to write multithreaded applications.

The Midori documents indicate that the company has not decided what user interface abstractions are appropriate when applications cut across boundaries, or how to combine the best qualities of rich client applications and Web applications.

Much more can be found in the actual article itself. Now Dave, mind telling me how you got ahold of this document? :)

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