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Gates Explains Longhorn Delay, Diet
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has set late 2006 as the deadline for shipping Longhorn, but to make that date, it had to delay the full implementation of WinFS, an ambitious file system geared at letting users search through all of their files at once. In this interview with Bill Gates, he provides a summary of why Microsoft decided to drop WinFS, saying: "WinFS, I'd be the first to say, is very ambitious. Nobody has ever brought together the world of documents, media and structured information in giving you one simple set of verbs that lets you richly find, move around and replicate those things." Meanwhile, MS Watch has published Longhorn head-honcho Jim Allchin's memo on why some Longhorn features had to be axed."
One problem with Konghorn is that they want to put security onto the Windows architecture. However this can be an endless source of problems. The Windows architecture is not secure beforehand. And integrating a security layer is doomed to be complicated and half-backery. They had already to change their security scheme because it turned out to be too slow (on a 3 GHz Pentium mind you).
The cleanest way would be to scrap the Windows architecture and rebuild the OS from bottom. But their popularity will bite their back and asses: this would breake approx 3.5 million applications and even simple stuff like Virtual Basic.
It's quite a shame as Gates could use a free, non-viral operating like OpenBSD as the basis for a new Windows version. This can be done as Apple has shown and the superior security and performance features of OpenBSD would make the WinOpenBSD the best system in teh world.
However, this would have the negative side effect they we would never see Linux on the desktop as OpenBSD is much better in the security and performance aspects and with the fool-safe user interface of Windows XP added it would really be a killer. And the user interface should be even more improved in the next version of Windows as MS is very hot in reseach there.