Microsoft Is Getting Serious About A Strange New Operating System That Won't Run Windows Apps

Microsoft is creating a brand new computer programming language and it could be using that language to create an operating system that has nothing to do with Windows.

The new language was revealed on Friday by a Microsoft researcher named Jim Duffy in a blog post. Its relationship to the new operating system was discussed on Reddit by someone claiming to be an ex-Microsoft employee.

This operating system is code-named Midori, reports ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley.

Midori has been in the works since at least 2008 as a pure research project, Foley reports. Midori was initially an experiment to write an operating system from scratch that was small and fast and didn't need to be compatible with the huge numbers of Windows apps already out on the market.

It looked like it was destined to remain a research project forever. But now it looks like Midori has been moved out of the research group and into the group that works on Microsoft's commercial operating systems (Windows, Windows RT, and Windows Phone), Foley reports:

I heard from two of my contacts that Midori -- Microsoft's non-Windows-based operating-system project -- moved into the Unified Operating System group under Executive Vice President Terry Myerson. (Before that, it was an incubation project, without a potential commercialization home inside the company.)

All of this could give us a glimpse into how Microsoft is preparing for a post-Ballmer, post-PC, post-Windows era.

We have to note: it seems unlikely that Microsoft would be willing to launch a brand new operating system separate from Windows anytime soon, especially since Windows 8 is essentially a break from the old Windows and Microsoft is still trying to get more developers to write apps for Windows 8.

It seems more likely that parts of Midori could wind up in Windows 9 or beyond.

However, the new langauge is also interesting. It's designed to write apps for today's cloud computing world, according to Duffy's blog post.

It isn't the only new language to take on cloud computing.

Google created a programming language called Golang (or Go) that's been catching on like wildfire, reports Infoworld's Serdar Yegulalp.

Go offers an alternative to a Oracle's tried-and-true Java programming language. Java is very popular with enterprises because it's powerful, but it was created long before the days of smartphones, tablets, and cloud computing. So Go creates apps that perform better in a cloud environment (memory usage, deployment ease etc.), says Go developer Travis Reeder. Reed is CTO of a site built on one of the first websites to use Go, he told Business Insider.

Microsoft has its own alternative to Java already, called .Net, which was also created before the cloud computing era.

Remember, Microsoft cut its teeth by making tools for programmers and still has a loyal following. Microsoft isn't going to concede a new cloud programming language to Google. And it certainly wouldn't use Google's language for its own next-generation operating system.