Whatever Happened to Midori? ⇥ zdnet.com

Mary Jo Foley is the best on the Microsoft beat:

I first blogged about Midori in 2008. Microsoft was assembling a team of crack engineers to build a new operating system that wasn’t based on the Windows kernel. The Midori team was charged with building not just the OS from scratch, but a full software stack, including a browser, related tools and more.

It sounds like this ambitious project — the Microsoft version of what Mac OS X was to Mac OS 9 — has been shut down internally, but lessons from it will carry through to future Microsoft products. It’s kind of a shame that there’s so much legacy support required of Windows; if Microsoft could do a clean-slate refresh of their operating system, I bet they would, if only because it would allow them a greater degree of flexibility and iteration internally.