Microsoft To Release Cloud-Oriented Windows OS

CWmike writes "Within a month, Microsoft will unveil what CEO Steve Ballmer called 'Windows Cloud.' The operating system, which will likely have a different name, is intended for developers writing cloud-computing applications, said Ballmer, who spoke to an auditorium of IT managers at a Microsoft-sponsored conference in London. Ballmer was short on details, saying more information would spoil the announcement. Windows Cloud is a separate project from Windows 7, the operating system that Microsoft is developing to succeed Windows Vista."

Microsoft Dark Cloud

Causes Rainy Day

Re:Microsoft Cloud

...lacks silver lining.

Don't hold your breath

This sounds like vapourware to me.

What it is...

It's not new and it's not vaporware, it's also not Windows on the cloud. It's called Microsoft Mesh. It's been in used for many months, although only the first few services are available. Right now you get PC to PC and PC to Web synchronization of data. It's pretty much the best document remote access / sharing solution right now.

MS wants to add applications too, which many people compare with Google Docs but it's not that at all. It's basically a way that people will be able to use the same app from anywhere, have multiple people use the same application thru this mesh. How it will end up working is.. as of yet unknown.

The upcoming PDC conference in October will be all about Mesh, which is what Balmer is referring to.

Re:Don't hold your breath

Actually, sounds like Ulteo. I've played with Ulteo and it is pretty close, and technically MS should be able to throw enough people behind something like it.

Hell no. Unlike some people, Microsoft knows what "OS" means, and it's an OS: process management, drivers, the entire party.

If you want to get intot he right mindset about this project, consider it a spinoff of the Windows Server family (but will likely be a subset powered mostly or entirely by .NET).

Re:Don't hold your breath

and it's an OS: process management, drivers, the entire party.

Please click my link... Ulteo can be installed (and looks a lot like Ubuntu). I only ran in in a virtual machine, but it seemed like a pretty nice little setup. My big complaint is that they have apt-get, but you really can't use it or stuff breaks.

Re:Don't hold your breath

I suspect you're closer than you think.

Some time ago, rumour had it that Microsoft had allocated ~300 of its best engineers to work on Midori [engadget.com], a product based on its Singularity research OS.

Singularity, for those not familiar with it, is a highly impressive piece of work. It's not actually Windows at all, in fact it bears absolutely no resemblence to any existing OS architecturally and didn't even support graphics when we were last able to look at it. But it was a ground-up fresh new OS that had the following characteristics: entirely .NET based (with extensions), extremely robust and extremely high performance.

In particular, Singularity is able to go about 30% faster on I/O intensive apps than traditional server operating systems like Linux and Windows because it doesn't use hardware process isolation, but rather does everything in software. Hmmm, an OS with no graphics support, no applications, but which can run .NET applications far faster than the competition. Sounds basically ideal for a server OS or "cloud windows" if you ask me.

Re:Don't hold your breath So hazy i can't see...

Project/Code Name?

Since this is Slashdot, how about...

"Insensitive Cloud"

Wonder if

they have an HTML version of the Blue Screen Of Death.

Re:Wonder if

But you need to install silverlight to view it.

Re:Wonder if

Every cloud has a silverlightning.

hohum

Somehow, putting the word "vista" in the same sentence as "succeed", for whatever reason, just seems plain wrong.

RMS was right!

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/30/2146250 [slashdot.org]

Windows for cloud computing

sounds like Airborne viruses.

I sense a disturbance in the Force ...

as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in labored puns about windows and clouds and nobody had the sense to silence them.

Cloud computing

It's a marketing phrase, designed to encourage you to offload your computing to the Cloud. The Cloud is where someone else controls your information, not you. Stallman says it's a trap. I'm inclined to believe him. When MicroHard starts promoting it? All the more reason to be leery of it.

Which competitor has just released something?

I haven't been following this stuff.

Is it safe to assume that some competitor has just released a working toolkit for developing cloud applications that works pretty well? And that Ballmer needs to get the pointy-haired boss to stop Dilbert from using that toolkit, and redesign the mission-critical project around Windows Cloud?

Yay for Windows Vapor!

I am so excited about $NEXT_VERSION of Windows [today.com]. It will go beyond just solving all of the problems with $CURRENT_VERSION, it will be an entirely new paradigm. Forget about security problems, those are all fixed in $NEXT_VERSION. And they're finally ridding themselves of $ANCIENT_LEGACY_STUFF.

Also, there'll be $DATABASE_FILESYSTEM. It'll be awesome!

I wonder how $NEXT_VERSION will compare to $NEXT_NEXT_VERSION.

("Windows Cloud"? Good freakin' gosh, what do they have for a marketing department?)

No Microsoft lock-in "advantage" in this field

The whole point of cloud computing is to run your server apps on whatever is available to run it. These apps do not, should not, and typically CANNOT do any configuration or long-term storage on any individual instance they run on, so everything they do is compartmentalized through specialized IO and shared storage APIs, which can be reimplemented on pretty much anything.

Sure, on the desktop everybody supports Windows, because they've got the drivers, Office is popular, etc etc. But going to any from-scratch model like cloud computing, Microsoft carries absolutely zero advantage or momentum from their other market saturations.

Good Call, Microsoft

Good Call, Microsoft. With five editions of Vista competing with three editions of XP and nine editions of Server 2008 (including three that are just the regular versions without the hypervisor software), plus separate 64-bit versions of everything, the Windows product line wasn't nearly diffuse enough.

Windows Cloud...

Because it will take at least seven standard PCs to boot the next version of Windows.

This already exists in the wild

This windows cloud computing stuff is already used to send millions of emails a day and so on. The product itself really isn't news, the only news is that Ballmer is finally giving it a product name so we can talk about it more effectively in the media.

For a list of computers participating in the Windows Cloud, go here [spamhaus.org] and request an rsync feed for the XBL.

Re:What is it?

This is the pre-announcement to announce an announcement. You'll have to wait for the actual announcement to find out what the hell it is.

Re:What is it?

I think you're missing the point. It's all about buzzword compliance.

Re:Distributed Blue Screen of Death

No, the Falling Blue Sky Of Death.