[wissler]

Most innovation is driven by at most a few individuals, but the bar is so high for a viable practical modern operating system that individuals are going to tend to take their innovation elsewhere.

This is not the ideal situation. Ideally, big companies like Microsoft or Apple would enable the right individuals to innovate in this area, unfortunately they are very bad at this. They do not know how to select these individuals, and even more importantly, leaving aside the rare likes of Elon Musk, the notion of radical innovation is rather contradictory to the institution of big business in our era.

[icebraining]

From Microsoft:

"Singularity is a research project focused on the construction of dependable systems through innovation in the areas of systems, languages, and tools. We are building a research operating system prototype (called Singularity), extending programming languages, and developing new techniques and tools for specifying and verifying program behavior."

"The Singularity Research Development Kit (RDK) 2.0 is now available for academic non-commercial use. You can download it from CodePlex, Microsoft's open source project hosting website"

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/singularity/

[wissler]

Nothing on that page gives the impression that it's more than proposed feature enhancements (which in themselves may be wonderful of course), as opposed to a fundamentally novel approach to operating systems.

[yachtintransit]

I agree with your sentiment regarding innovation is driven by a fee individuals. the good news is that its not about how high the bar is. you Don't need to compete on legacy metrics, you just need to do something that that the other system could never ( or at least with great difficulty ) do. another great thing about os's is they are really not that big once you take out all the vendor fragmentation from different device drivers.

you could really narrow things down by just targeting a specific hardware set set ( like a raspberryPi ). Actually now that I said it, that's the only hw I would target . reduced footprint , experimental user group , arm architecture. its the perfect platform to launch a 'different ' kind of os.