Microsoft believes that it is time for Vista to go.
In my opinion Vista actually never arrived but that is a different story. According to a story in Tarkash, now Microsoft may scrap window platform altogether, it will be a paradigm shift. In an incubation project (This jargon is the only confirmation from Microsoft so far) called Medori, Microsoft will replace windows platform with this web based operating system.
Leaks from Microsoft suggests that there will a intermediate windows edtion between Vista and Midori. If Midori leaks are true, however, the operating system might not be backwards-compatible with the current Vista/Windows 7 OS, meaning that the billions of dollars spent on Windows infrastructure might have to be reinvested on Midori-compatible applications. At this point, however, that's speculation.
CG
1:41 PM
I taking this story with a grain of salt for now. I think what we are going to witness will not be a shift, but a supporting venture.
I don't think backwards compatibility is going to be a problem, because Microsoft will publicise it as a different platform than Windows.
Let's see what emerges.