News.com has a review of the struggles of Longhorn. Among other delays and setbacks noted, word from Microsoft that the WinFS file system wouldn’t be released in Windows Server until 2009.
Trials of Longhorn
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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The general feeling of the article is that Microsoft is back-peddling a lot of its schedules to be much more conservative on all fronts. Longhorn, WinFS, Server 2003 64bit, Service Pack 1 for Win2k3 Server family, and Win x86. I wonder what is taking up so much of their man power to cause them to put what seems to be almost everything on hold.
Sorry, don’t mean to complain, but 2009? This supposed to be one of the top 3 features that was being promoted and its being pushed back 4 years? It will be in the next OS release after longhorn.
Just disappointed… Seems like delay after delay…
What will longhorn look like after all? I mean without the new file system, and all the other features that they won’t be able to deliver by ’06, what will users get besides a flashy new interface, maybe more security and stability, and some other minor improvement to the OS’ media integration (like better photo preview and organization, etc)?
Microsoft do tend to promise what they can’t deliver.
I agree it is disappointing, however from what it seems they want WinFS to be it really doesn’t sound like an easy or simple task. Especially considering it is going to the file system/structure that they want everyone to migrate everything from photos last week to your most valuable data (whatever it is), this isn’t something to really rush or have mistakes in that they can prevent.
>Quote “What will longhorn look like after all?”
Windows XP SP3….??
It’s a good queston Tudy. Just what will customers be paying for?
seriously though, I think that Microsoft is finally starting to show that they feel the pressure from both Apple and Linux. They are realizing that people don’t want to wait five to seven years for a new OS to come out, so they have to ditch feature to push the release forward.
But then, if they ditch all the features they end up with… nothing at all. But I think you’re right. And the problem comes from apple’s and Linux’s release schedules… and what they release.
When MS realeases a new OS (leaving aside the question of it being really new), they sell it as a complete overhaul, a complete new system. Linux releases (be it a new kernel or or a distro’s update) are almost continuous, and OS X seems to be aiming to a similar strategy, with minor version updates. They may include new stuff, even mayor updates, but they openly admit that it’s not a new system.
Now MS needs to justify the upgrade to what is sold as a complete new system. And they can’t sell updates, as ‘service packs’ are asumed by everyone to be free of charge.
“Now MS needs to justify the upgrade to what is sold as a complete new system. And they can’t sell updates, as ‘service packs’ are asumed by everyone to be free of charge.”
Apple sells their OS X system updates, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3,and now 10.4 – its the security patches and bug fixes with the 10.x.Y they don’t charge for and those are pushed via Software Update.
I don’t see why Windows couldn’t easily be sold this way. Those large Service Packs that do significant system overhaul become your $100 OS version bumps like with Apple’s boxed version of each OSX release, and Windows Update becomes your interem releases and minor feature fixes.
I think MS is wisely focusing on their media centre product. I think people would much prefer all the goodies that the media centre is offering than Avalon or WinFS.
I really feel that Apple should do something like this. A little box on top of your TV that allowed access to your computer through a wireless connection so you could record TV shows to it and also play back movies, music and view pictures from your computer on your TV. Maybe their “headless iMac” thingy is exactly this…
“They are realizing that people don’t want to wait five to seven years for a new OS to come out, so they have to ditch feature to push the release forward.”
I think most people would rather postpone the hassle of upgrading their Windows setups for as long as possible.
Does anyone really want Longhorn? It seems like a product for which demand will have to be created, rather than one customers are waiting for.
“Apple sells their OS X system updates, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3,and now 10.4 – its the security patches and bug fixes with the 10.x.Y they don’t charge for and those are pushed via Software Update.”
IF those are what you call “system updates”, then I have news for you. Windows 5.1 (XP) wasn’t a free update for Windows 5.0 (2000) either, you had to pay for it more than Apple charges for its “system updates”. Don’t be so ignorant.
I think they’ve set their goal at the begining of the development too high. Now they’re just forced to remove features that corporations don’t use – leaving aside that the average user might need them. Is it just me or is Microsoft becoming more and more like IBM?
Hate to break it to you, but the change from Windows 2000 to Windows XP, was about as large as the change from XP to XP SP2. So yeah it would make sense for them to charge using that model.
While we are on the subject, yes I do call moving from 10.2 to 10.3 and now to 10.4 “system updates”. The only hugely massive change (as in almost complete sytem overhaul) to OSX and the Darwin subcore came with 10.0 to 10.1 and then to 10.2 when they moved to match the BSD 5 branch. And I have news for you – I know because I’ve bought every single one of them.
Stop rattling your empty can so loudly.
I don’t think MS will really get any work done on Longhorn untill they are able to get a good look at OSX Tiger.
In anything, it is far better to make a small splash then work your way to finish with a big bang!
MS usually takes the last bus then yells, “me too, me too, I can do that, too, and I can beat all of you”.
I am tired.
One of the often cited comments of Apple is that they under claim and out perform when it comes to new products.
Microsoft could learn a valuable lesson in that.
Good point. MS is caught between a rock and a hard place. MacOSX is a better desktop than Windows whereas Linux is a better server. Windows is somewhere in the middle.
MacOSX is slowly moving into the entertainment and server area, Linux (and Open Source technology like OpenOffice and Firefox) is slowly moving into the desktop and embedded areas. Windows is being squeezed on both sides and it needs to plan out it next moves carefully.
It’s a war on two fronts. Microsoft needs to solidify its base, but since Microsoft has spread itself so thin lately (Windows Server, Windows Desktop, Embedded XP, PocketPC, X-box, MS Office, MediaPC, MS hardware, .NET, MS Money, MSN, MSN Web Search, Avalon, ISS, ASP, SQLServer, VB, Anti-Spyware, …) they don’t really have a base. I’m guessing that different factions in MS are trying to push Longhorn in different directions (similarly to what happened to IBM before it focused on Linux and Professional Services). The harder they fight, the longer Longhorn will take.
So I don’t think I think the reason Longhorn is being delayed is technical. I think it’s political. If Microsoft had to deliver WinFS this year, they could either buy or build it within this time. Okay, it may not have all the features they want but the basic concept can and has been done thousands of times in the last decade.
well i dont know if i cant wait for longhorn but i will get it once it comes out if my school is handying out free copys like they did when xp first came out
We already have databases. Make a fast reliable file system. Combining them adds nothing but lockin.
“…this isn’t something to really rush or have mistakes in that they can prevent.”
Never stopped them before.
I think you are correct. However, I think Sun is another facet of the Linux/UNIX front, as Solaris 10 has features Microsoft is no where near (not by a thousand miles), but it competes in the same pricing levels as Windows. And Sun is making big inroads into Asia on behalf of Linux with their JDS (at odds with stripped-down Windows). HP and IBM, also, are touting Linux in various ways, all the way up to mainframes. Basically, Microsoft is all alone in the world.
At the end of the day, all Microsoft really has is Office. That’ll be their revenue stream when they are living their days as a legacy support provider to all the businesses who use Office for automation. In the future, I predict that Sun, HP, and IBM will be battling it out over shares of the Linux/UNIX market, with others as niche players.
What I meant is Microsoft does not charge you for service packs. So if now they started releasing stuff with minor version numbers, people wouldn’t see much difference between that and a service pack, and they wouldn’t like having to pay for that.
Of course MS can change its policy and start charging, but people wouldn’t like it a bit.
please… are you that vacuous in your reasoning?
there are as many changes between 2000 to XP as there are between 10.2 and 10.3.
both companies charged for them. if you think that version numbers mean anything about the relative advancements in a software then you are very ignorant of the facts.
and if you expect that a new Kernel and Display system are required for advancing the minor number.. then you have very high expectations of a software company.
Hate to break it to you, but the change from Windows 2000 to Windows XP, was about as large as the change from XP to XP SP2. So yeah it would make sense for them to charge using that model.
How? There is very little new you can do with windows XP,that you couldn’t do in NT4.
XP may be somewhat more stable and more secure, but the people who once bought NT4 was told that this that was stable and secure. So why should they feel inclined to pay for a minor upgrade, given the Microsoft track reckord.
It is no wonder that there is a lot of businesses that still have not upgraded. What’s the return of investment? An upgrade costs a lot in terms of labor, lost time, education , not ot mention the licence fee. In the end they expect the next version is just as haunted by virues and bugs as the previos one.
This means that Microsoft will have to come out with something really spectacular to regain the confidence of their customers. Even if they do, it is questionalbe if it will be enough. Most office work is quite well covered by existing versions, and I don’t see home users buying office suites and servers en masse.
To avoid loosing their leading position, Microsoft will probably have to get new customers as well. Their expansion into media makes perfect sense in that respect.
i think it is absolutely ridiculous about what MS is doing. do they really think that if they keep pushing back releases and keep pushing back the reasons why anyone would actually upgrade their os to the next os like winfs and so on then they must be kidding themselves. the whole point of longhorn i thought would be the filesystem and other enhancements. i dont need texture mapping and directx 9 nad wgf 1.0 or whatever the heck those apis are called so i can just run the ui on my os. that is absolutely ridiculous. i think as a computer user and as a student i think this is outrageous that ms will expect us to pay for the next bs they come out with. i think all software developers for windows should change their focus to linux and make everything on linux work. that way people like me who are still stuck on xp can move everything to linux…games and what not. this is outragous.
I think for me valraven has hit the nail on the head. At the moment MS needs to get thier file system rock solid. NTFS at the moment is garbage as far as file systems go and to bolt a database onto it is suicide. Fragmentation and truncation are major issues MS has to sort out if they want Windows to get on the level of the Nix’s. One can’t run Windows in a heavy file load environment without the use of 3rd party utilities running constantly in the background. Without such, the OS just constantly falls over.
The big confusion with Microsoft support is that they confuse versions with bug-fixes, across the board, and while that has been their strength in the past, it is now a thorn in their side.
Pop open windows update for a moment. It doesn’t just have security and bug-fixes listed, nor does it contain itself to “Extras” like language packs and small maintenance utilities. It contains complete new versions of major software.
There are new versions of Media Player, Direct-X, Service Packs (Major point-releases for everyone else-with new features), Internet Explorer, Outlook, a new spyware program (this may be a “security” item, though), and much more.
Of course, if MS charged for some of these things, no one would buy upgrades. And herein lies the problem — the desire to push customers along, support developers with advanced technology, and convince people their to swallow their buzzwords against the cost of loosing significant reason to upgrade.
It has come with many software publishers, and conventional wisdom, that the bug-fixes and security patches are expected, that these problems are a flaw in the original program that the complex “licensing” of the software implies. In a conventional turnover, of, say, five years, by the cycle end the version would have become unpopular enough that exploits would have dwindled due to lack of critical mass.
I mean, how many new DOS or Amiga viruses have you heard of?
Drop Internet Explorer, drop Direct-X, or fail to provide version updates for older systems, and you are facing big difficulties from your users and developers. They may not support your newest version, they want to ensure the humble Windows 98 user can play their game. They want the biggest market possible. Maybe they’ll use OpenGL or Firefox.
I can’t solve their problem, but maybe I am seeing it better from the outside.
Maybe Microsoft should license Reiser4 from Namesys
I find it interesting that dx9c is the last version that supports win2K. Could this be a MS way to tell people to get off win2K and onto winXP and Longhorn? No security updates for win2K users either? Is MS being fair or practical or what?
Longhorn 2014 – I can’t wait ! Oh, no, MS said that it’ll be delayed to 2017…
Sorry guys, I couldn’t resist
Mod me down, no problem…
Longhorn 2014 – I can’t wait ! Oh, no, MS said that it’ll be delayed to 2017…
You actually do have a point. For most businesses, an upgrade cycle of 10-15 years would make much more business sense. Provided we still could get support for old stuff like word 95 and NT4, my company probably could run our business just as well as on any modern successor of windows.
If the software was used over a longer period of time, employees would actually have time to learn it. They would take advantage of many of the advanced features of modern OSes and application software.
An organization that doesn’t constantly spend time on learning new ways of doing old stuff will probably be more efficient, even though the old tools doesnt provides the latest bells and wisles. Not to mention how fast software designed to run on old and slow hardware would run on a modern machine.
Everybody who wants Windows XP, owns it already, and the realease date of Longhorn is still almost two years ahead. But the best thing is that once Longhorn is actually released, you can get Indigo and Avalon to XP as extensions. The only part you can’t get is WinFS, which, as previously stated, won’t be released until 2009. In other words, Windows is already dead.
Please do make an effort to understand what people say. Just a small one.
I didn’t say a single thing about the content of the updates. But the situation as percieved by the public is that going from Windows 2000 to Windows XP does cost money, while going from XP SP1 to XP SP2 is, and has always been, free of charge.
just call it Duke Nuk’em forever 3d.
Just two quick questions.
1. Has Windows ever delivered everything their marketing people and their pet editors have claimed would be delivered?
2. When has a release of Windows ever been on time.
News.com has a review of the struggles of Longhorn. Among other delays and setbacks noted, word from Microsoft that the WinFS file system wouldn’t be released in Windows Server until 2009.
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Well,well,well. Lookie here.
After all the *CRAP* posted here and other places about how the Linux community needs to *RUSH* out and start building WinFS style filesystems for Linux *RIGHT NOW* or they would get left behind in the dust by Longhorn, it turns out that Microsoft won’t able to get to *SHIP* it for almost *4* years.
You got to wonder if all postings that whine about how Linux needs to focus on this or that aspect of Longhorn or MAC OS X is nothing about an attempt by certain people to get the Linux and BSD communities to waste time working on features they have absolutely no use for.
Longhorn is delayed because……
After Longhorn, MS don’t have a slightest clue what to do next, so they are delaying it as long as they can… : )
New acronym: asatc (as long as they can).
@ BFG: I hope not, that fs is totally f*cked up
It is a service that runs ontop of NTFS, maybe they dicided to make it one though what else could explain the delay? Really, by 2009 Linux OSs might be a major competitor.
Everybody who wants Windows XP, owns it already, and the realease date of Longhorn is still almost two years ahead.
The number of people who wants XP will increase now that Microsoft have ended the support of Windows NT4, no more security fixes usually means an upgrade.
They will be able to do the same trick in 2007 when win 2k is out in the cold.
Try Netware
My heart rejoices in how they’ll bloody fail.. this f*ing piece of crap has tortured me since christmas 1995 when I got my own computer (P90, 8MB, 850MB). It has wasted so many hours of work and potential work (and it ate my precious data, too); it has annoyed the spine out of me sometimes and it was quite hard to always stand through it and not seriously crush my computer. But for all the grief it has cost me, those times are over. Since over half a year I run Gentoo Linux full time, and I haven’t booted my XP partition since then (it is broken anyways, so why give a damn) – and it has made my computer experience so much more enjoyable. These years will see M$’ downfall, after all.
They had their chances. They just would have had to admit to themselves they screwed up big time. They should have released WinXP, take 100 of their 5000 highly skilled (guess so) programmers for XP maintainance, put the other 4900 on a camp event and get some hackers there to give them some inspiration and counsel on methods of software engineering and code modularity, safety and stability. Then they should have had a big brainstorming and, after that, take a few months drafting a new modern OS and _then_ start implementation. If they would have admitted, ‘yeah, basically windows is a piece of sh1t because the structure is inefficient and illogical, let’s throw this shit away and do better /because we can/’, they _might_ have a good OS foundation for what they plan for the future by now. Windows compatibility to some extend, with so many people and a clean concept, would not have been a big issue. But now, Bill Gates and his crew were to blended and arrogant/proud to admit. Now, the race is lost for them, they have fallen way behind in terms of development speed…
OSS is not about merketing and selling, but about solving issues by programming, so the things M$ has ‘promised’ for the future are either working already or being implemented at this time.
So in terms of technicality/features:
Avalon & DirectX < QT Arthur & X Composite & OpenGL
WinFS < Reiser4
.NET < ???
Internet Explorer <<<< Konqueror, Firefox
Windows Media Player (uarg) <<< (Kaffeine,)xine, mplayer
this Longhorn thing is a joke. They’ll loose, this year will finally be the year of the desktop revolution I hope. It’s getting idiotproof, and stays logical. QT/KDE 4, XOrg 6.9 and so on and on will definitly kick ass, and for free. They (M$) cannot compete. Not even with luck and a lot of work – it is too late to reorient and fix this 30 million patchcode pile Window by doing it again. They shot their own knees by not doing it before.
And, haha, the EU is most probably forcing M$ to sell Windows without the media player, so what they gonna do with their media center approach.
Oh, Bill Gates is gonna be pretty annoyed ’bout that free enemy. But this time, he can not do anything about it. It’s too late.
muah. ;======)
“.NET < ???”
I know you said OSS, but I would put “J2ME, J2SE, and J2EE” up against .NET. Java is open enough to suit everyone but the most hardened OSS zealots. Java is also the most complete and mature cross-platform kit available. Lots of people deploy JSP on Linux, for example, as a good app server.
i think microsoft’s new longhorn is not just a operating sytem. it is the basic for their os for next 20 years. that is why it is taking so long for them to release. i will be not be suprise if longhorn ships with just an os with nothing else. they wil stuff on it for the further vs and sell us the same os over and over again for next 20 years
i would not be suprise that they will drop the name windows and just call it longhorn because next ver of windows after longhorn will be called longhorn 2 longhorn 3 and so on
let us all give linux and chance and bring it to them main stream still they work on the basic ver of longhorn
i would not be suprise that they will drop the name windows and just call it longhorn because next ver of windows after longhorn will be called longhorn 2 longhorn 3 and so on
If I was Microsoft I would call it something else than Longhorn in the released version. People associate the name with something they have waited for too long. It is allready being called names like LongWait.
Microsoft have allready altered their naming strategy for their new products starting with windows 2k. By giving the OS a brand new name they try to give their customers the impression that they are selling something brand new, when in fact it is not. E.g. It would probably have been harder to get people to upgrade if they had used names like NT5 and NT5.1 instead of win2k and XP. So I don’t think we will see any Longhorn 2.
i think microsoft’s new longhorn is not just a operating sytem. it is the basic for their os for next 20 years.
Longhorn is Windows NT 6. Heck, it might even only be NT 5.5.