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Called Midori, the cut-down operating system is radically different to Microsoft's older programs.

It is centred on the internet and does away with the dependencies that tie Windows to a single PC.

It is seen as Microsoft's answer to rivals' use of "virtualisation" as a way to solve many of the problems of modern-day computing.

Tie breaking

Although Midori has been heard about before now, more details have now been published by Software Development Times after viewing internal Microsoft documents describing the technology.

Midori is believed to be under development because Windows is unlikely to be able to cope with the pace of change in future technology and the way people use it.

Windows worked well in an age when most people used one machine to do all their work. The operating system acted as the holder for the common elements Windows programs needed to call on.

"If you think about how an operating system is loaded," said Dave Austin, European director of products at Citrix, "it's loaded onto a hard disk physically located on that machine.

"The operating system is tied very tightly to that hardware," he said.

That, he said, created all kinds of dependencies that arose out of the collection of hardware in a particular machine.