Microsoft once wanted to kill Windows and replace it with the Midori operating system

Windows currently dominates the market share on computers. 

Recently, social network user X WalkingCat posted a video of a secret Microsoft meeting from 2013, revealing many previously unknown details about the long-discontinued Midori project.

Midori is a cloud-based operating system that Microsoft began developing in 2008 and discontinued it in 2015.

The Midori project was established to develop new innovations in all Microsoft software including programming languages, operating systems, browsers, applications,.

In the videos, team member Joe Duffy (now CEO of Pulumi) talks about the three main focuses of the project which are cloud platform, concurrency and safety, along with interoperability with Windows.

The cloud platform will provide the highest performance and scalability, improve efficiency and output, and provide strong safety measures that ensure the operating system can isolate problems and prevent incidents.

Duffy said, Midori is a system where each driver runs as its own process, with no third-party code running in the kernel. This will allow the operating system to isolate errors and ignore codes that cause problems. Therefore, this operating system always boots successfully, avoiding technology incidents that greatly affected the whole world like last July.

Microsoft does not apply this to Windows, which instead allows third-party software to run at the kernel level, where they have full access to the system. Just one bug in third-party code can cause the entire system to crash. What happened with the CrowdStrike incident, "the biggest technology incident in history".

Jessica Tanner

Update 14 August 2024