Up pops Microsoft

As if by magic, Microsoft appear in the news just as I was musing that they had been very quiet. They have a number of research projects underway that fall under the ‘platforms’ umbrella (an admittedly very vague remit). Midori is the name currently given to a concept that MS are examining that is to make their OS a little bit more amorphous. Or, in my opinion, to try and make it more adaptable and more likely to be on mobile devices – running on traditional PC architectures and also the ARM chipsets that are on so many phones:

Several sources have continued to chip away at the Midori story, piecing together critical portions of the overall Midori strategy, here, but in one fell swoop, Worthington snatched the limelight by landing what we shall call “the goods,” an internal document Microsoft has closely guarded.

According to Worthington, “Midori is an offshoot of Microsoft Research’s Singularity operating system, the tools and libraries of which are completely managed code. Midori is designed to run directly on native hardware (x86, x64 and ARM), be hosted on the Windows Hyper-V hypervisor, or even be hosted by a Windows process.”

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Microsoft has other goodies in store, too. Midori is also critical to Microsoft’s cloud computing strategy.

Taken from here.

Thoughts on Nokia’s Strategy

Two interesting developments for the company were the closure of the device plant in Bochum and the move to acquire rights to the Symbian platform. The former is ostensibly down to a row over government subsidy but perhaps it can be interpreted as a sign that Nokia is strategically repositioning itself for in the long term. The Sybian acquisition is evidence of this as it is clear that Nokia is not happy with being the world-leading producer of mobile devices. Perhaps the device market is seen as a difficult market in the future with expensive device development…

That brings us to shades of old battle between IBM and Microsoft; hardware versus platform. Nobody wants to be stuck in the hole that IBM found themselves back in the day. This time however we have a number of candidates vying for that all-important “platform of the masses” status, with MS Windows, Google’s Android, and Symbian as the main players (there others, like Linux variants such as Maemo).