The Midori coverage from SD Times has gone mainstream, even making the front page of BBC World News this morning. Since I reviewed the technical portions of the documents for the story, I thought I might clarify some things. First, though:
- I have no idea who wrote the document
- I have no idea how SD Times came into possession of the document
- I have no idea when the document was written
For all I know, what I reviewed might have been the musings of some 14-year-old in Novosobirsk. A very technical 14-year-old, but who knows?
Substantively, what I can say is that the documents were quite technical and were quite provocative -- they weren't a retrospective on Singularity that we conflated into a discussion of a future OS. The technicality of the documents actually gave me some pause: the unguarded tone and technical depth made me think "this is a long way from being a press release."
Taking the documents at face value, they laid out a very aggressive, very ambitious, scenario for Midori. By "aggressive" and "ambitious," what I mean is that the author really grabs the bull by the horns and addresses concurrency and legacy head-on. Although there's a lot of talk in the analysis about "how is this going to work with legacy Windows" what's interesting to me, personally, is that the technical path being discussed is not a mealy-mouthed "we have to acknowledge the concurrent era" but rather is a full-throated "we have to reinvent what we talk about when we talk about OS."
What I read was the type of stance that some people don't think happens at Microsoft. I was impressed. ("It's all about concurrency": Larry is impressed. What a surprise.) Was it a deliberately leaked trial balloon? I dunno'.