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Carrie Dugan, User Experience Designer and Researcher, has a brief-but-interesting mention of, “Midori” on her website. She lists having worked with Microsoft’s, “Security Technology Unit” from May 2006 – 2007 on a, “special project virtual team for the next security OS, “Midori”.” Midori, the next, “security OS?” I’m curious as to exactly what that means. It makes me think in terms of ISA Server or Forefront. I would’ve emailed her to inquire, but I’m sure that would’ve been an exercise in futility. Mary Jo Foley first broke the ice with Midori, so maybe she could shed a little bit of light on this. Regardless, she also mentions having worked on a, “special project virtual team,” the, “Zeno “Conceptual Modeling Team” for post-Vista release,” which (you guessed it), means Windows 7.

Correlating her mention of, “Zeno” in her resume with what she has on her website, “Zeno” is apparently a, “Cloud Computing Model.” She lists the research method being used as, “conceptual modeling derived from empirical research.” Included with that vague and somewhat confusing description, is a graphical representation of the, “Zeno” model. For those of you into cloud computing, perhaps this will be much more meaningful to you than it is to me (click the image for a humongously large version):

How does this, “Cloud Computing Model” named, “Zeno” fit into Windows 7? I’m guessing that it may have something to do with Windows Azure, if not having become part of Windows Azure all together, but I’m not, AZURE about that as I am about other things… (I know, I know… horrible pun…) Anyone else feel like jumping on this bandwagon to clarify some things or make some guestimates?

-Stephen