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"You are an idiot if you believe Microsoft is actually going to have a completely rewritten operating system before Bill Gates dies (which might be 20 to 40 more years)," Robert blogged on Tuesday. For some reason, the post didn't show up in my RSS reader until today.

Robert referred to so-called non-Windows operating system Midori, which was big news on Tuesday and again today. SDTimes reporter David Worthington got hold of some leaked documents about Midori, which I blogged analysis. David's stories: Part One and Part Two.

Journalists "love to make it seem that Microsoft is working hard on a new, completely rewritten, operating system that will solve all the world's problems," Robert wrote. "Let me assure you they are not. At least not one that'll be productized before my 10-month-old son sees his 10th birthday."

GOT A TIP OR RUMOR?

Oh my. He's so certain. But so is David, who has documents in hand about a so-called new operating system. They can't both be right, can they? Yes, they can, methinks.

Today, David wrote about Microsoft's migration plan from Windows to Midori, which reads as widely convoluted to me (not the story but the plan). What's troubling: The leaked Microsoft documents offer up several software architectural options for transitioning operating systems, according to the SDTimes story. Had this information been available on Tuesday, I would have softened my take on Midori.

Already, I expressed grave concerns that the project might be overambitious. My take after reading the second story: Midori might not be much of an operating system project at all, but something more in the early planning stages. If that's the case, Robert may very well be right about when, if ever, Microsoft releases a completely new OS.

What makes more sense, and I alluded to this in my analysis on Tuesday, is a cloud operating system. I haven't seen the documents David is writing from, so there's some guesswork here on my part. In my reading and rereading of his first story, .Net clearly has a hugely important role in Midori, much, much larger than the text conveys. .Net is Microsoft's services glue.

Who is supposedly responsible for Midori? The very heads-down Eric Rudder, senior vice president of technical strategy. But he is better known for something else. In 2002, Business Week described Eric as ".Net's general." I remember Eric as the .Net evangelist.

I've got to say that Robert's explanation for what Midori might really be makes loads of sense to me. His theory also resolves most of the questions David's story raised for me. Robert blogged:

"By building an OS completely in .Net they can discover where .Net is deficient. They can use it to bug the .Net team to improve that system until they get it good enough to use it underneath a new operating system. Let's say it takes them 10 years to iterate through all the things that .Net needs to do to become a real operating-system-level platform/language. Imagine then that Microsoft could roll that stuff into a version of Windows. Wow, wouldn't that be useful to have rafts of the OS all built on .Net and hosting a new kind of .Net app?"

Yes it would.