Is this the next generation of Windows (Midori)?

This is a video I found of Youtube and the interesting thing about it is that it is an application that runs on the browser. The emphasis here is not the application itself but the technology used to create the application. The other emphasis is that the application runs on the internet – so that means you access it from anywhere.

Silverlight is a really powerful technology because you can create applications that run on the internet. Recently Microsoft announced that it was developing an operating system (code named Midori) that “is centred on the internet and does away with the dependencies that tie Windows to a single PC”.

In the video, you can see an example of a Silverlight application. It is a simple video editing application that has a user-friendly interface. It also has windows, a desktop and a bin. It is very interactive but more importantly, has the potential to evolve into a full operating system.

It may seem like an idea that doesn’t make sense but imagine if Microsoft developed the Office Suite, a browser, a multimedia player and all the applications that you can think of for that operating system. And imagine if they allowed third party developers to develop their own applications for it and gave users the ability to save their stuff online. That would mean that you can save all your bookmarks and not worry about them being unavailable when you’re using another computer.

This could mean that users can access their new desktop from any computer that has internet connection. Not only will this benefit end users but also businesses. If you think about it, this is a large network (the internet) and all the desktops are connected to it. This will make collaboration much easier and cheaper.

I think this should be the way forward and we should maximise the potentiol of the internet to make our lives easier. The benifits of this are huge but with it come more problems: governments will want to access people’s files (everything) with/without their knowledge, the risk of data loss increases and there will always be people who would want to sabotage the system.