Is Microsoft going to replace Windows with Midori?

With the Internet increasingly taking on the role of the PC operating system and the growing prevalence of virtualization technologies, there will be a day when the Microsoft Windows client OS as it's been developed for the past 20-odd years becomes obsolete.

Microsoft seems to be preparing for that day with an incubation project code-named Midori, which seeks to create a componentized, non-Windows OS that will take advantage of technologies not available when Windows first was conceived, according to published reports.

Although Microsoft won't comment publicly on what Midori is, the company has confirmed that it exists. Several reports -- the most comprehensive to date published on Tuesday by Software Development Times -- have gone much further than that. 

That report paints Midori as an Internet-centric 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. More...

See also: Microsoft to stop selling Windows XP...

And this: Windows 7 to be released next year?