Bye-bye Windows
It appears that the software that managed to put a PC on every desk will soon be retired. Very hard to imagine the ubiquitous Windows no longer running our lives. Yet this is what a new report has suggested.
Apparently this is Microsoft’s strategy for survival in the future. Prompted by the steamrolling usage of OS-independent Internet and failure of Windows Vista, internal documents of Microsoft have described a project codenamed Midori that seemed to be a marked departure from Windows OS.
Midori is centred on the internet and does away with the dependencies that tie Windows to a single PC. It is seen as Microsoft’s answer to rivals’ use of “virtualisation” as a way to solve many of the problems of modern-day computing.
It is also supposed to be a cut-down version of the humongous size of Vista. Yeah right… I’ll believe it when I see it. And judging from Microsoft’s recent track record, the clean final version will probably arrive sometime like 2015.
What is Midori? According to Wikipedia, it’s principally a Japanese word (as you could have probably guessed) for ‘green’ that can also be either
- name of ward (district) in several Japanese cities
- name for Japanese people, including several well known people (violinist, author, figure skater and a porn star)
- name for anime series (Midori Days), manga series (Midori Sugiura) and 2 films
- a green melon flavored liquer from Mexico
- name of a character in the video game Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock
- most interestingly, it is also the name of a Linux distribution that was created around 2001 by Transmeta. The project was led by Linus Torvalds.
An article in PC World suggested that part of the Microsoft’s paranoia of being left irrelevant in the people way uses computer in the world in future has led to the recent failed bid for Yahoo.
Apparently cloud computing is the way to go… but the way Streamyx dominates the local broadband market and its sigh-sluggishness, it will be a loooong way to go. I was very excited when the Telekom CTO told me about their plan for fibre-to-the-home high-speed-broadband (HSBB) program last year. From my personal experience in the ISP business, this thing is a capital-guzzler and do not make money (except for the contractors) so it was great that the Govt and Telekom willing to do their national service part.
Sad to say, the green-monsters are now involved, this thing has become politicised and the original plan to have the first service rolled out by end of 2008 will unlikely to materialise. Sigh….
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