Longhorn in 2006

worm eater writes "Microsoft Watch reports that Microsoft officials are now aiming for a 2006 release date for Longhorn, the follow up to Windows XP. Microsoft has been hyping aspects of this OS to its partners since 2001. I'm beginning to wonder if the industry will be in a far different place than Microsoft envisions 3 years down the line."

Comments

Re:Keep putting it off. Please !

[CaptBubba]

What's keeping microsoft from breaking a few things compatibility-wise to get you to upgrade? DRM could be blamed for a lot of "problems"...

Re:Am I the only one...

[Zocalo]

I'm not too sure about that. For all their ethical faults Microsoft does employ some very savvy people, and they have to realise that DRM simply isn't going to survive the attentions of the crackers. I've suspected for a long while the Microsoft's support for DRM is merely playing lip service to the media corporations who seem to be getting an awful lot of political pull in corporate America at present. Having that kind of ally could be very useful the next time an anti-trust suit comes along, and it's a lot of license revenue too...

My own pet theory about the tardiness of Longhorn is that Microsoft has simply decided to do a re-write of a huge chunk of the code. There are two possible candidates for why that I can see; firstly they really are trying to take their new stance on security seriously and are redoing some of the cruftier bits of code. Far more likely though is that they simply got too ambitious (again) over their Cairo-esque multimedia filesystem, decided the hardware and market still isn't ready for it and went back to the drawing board.