Videos of a confidential Microsoft meeting from 2013 have been leaked by X user WalkingCat, revealing many previously unknown details about the long-dead Midori project. Starting in 2008 and officially meeting its end in 2015, the Midori project was tasked with developing new innovations throughout Microsoft's software stack. This included the programming language, the operating system, the browser, applications, and more.

What was Midori?

In the videos, team member Joe Duffy (now CEO of Pulumi) talks about how the project started, what its aims were, and the main ways it planned to achieve them. The three main focuses of the project, according to Duffy's blog, were the cloud, concurrency, and safety, along with interoperability with Windows. The cloud would provide peak performance and scalability, concurrency would improve efficiency and output, and robust safety measures would ensure that the OS could isolate problems and prevent crashes. Another interesting fact about the project is that the entire team was made up of engineers — even the people with managerial roles still contributed code.

One feature discussed in the videos is particularly relevant to recent events — the device driver model. Duffy talks about a system where no third-party code runs in the kernel, with each driver instead running as a process. This approach would allow the operating system to isolate failures and ignore the code causing the problem, so it could always boot successfully. This is something Windows doesn't currently do, instead allowing third-party software to run in kernel mode where it has full access to the system. Unfortunately, this means a bug in the third-party code can cause the entire system to crash, which is exactly what happened with the CrowdStrike IT outage in July. In other words, if the world had been running Midori instead Windows, the outage would not have happened at all.

Although the project was canceled, Microsoft's official stance on the topic is that the company is incorporating learnings from Midori into future projects, like Windows 11. Now that these details about Midori have been brought to the public's attention, Microsoft might find itself receiving input from its customers on which features they should start implementing. However, with Windows' current spaghetti architecture, that's probably easier said than done — which is half the reason Midori started as a "no legacy" project in the first place.