Microsoft Demands Removal Of Longhorn Images

bonch writes "After the previously reported release of the Longhorn beta at this year's WinHEC, Neowin and other Windows sites are reporting that Microsoft is going around sending legal letters demanding removal of Longhorn Build 5048 screenshots. Paul Thurrott discusses it on his site, stating that Microsoft never told anyone beforehand not to post screenshots of the publicly available beta, and links to the new galleries he has up now. 'Enjoy it while it lasts.'"

Comments

maybe if we slam the stable door hard enough?

[akadruid]

At least now Jobs has something valid to complain about MS copying them.

or was he just psychic?

Re:I bet

[node 3]

As soon as your copy of XP can keep two folders auto-sync'd over a network, then you give me a call. Longhorn can do that, and it's one of the big features I'm waiting for.

I was skeptical about Longhorn, but after hearing that... lol

Seriously, I can't believe how many people here are focusing on the visuals.

Because there's nothing else to focus on. We've been hearing for years now how Longhorn is going to have all this cool stuff in it, but what have we seen so far? An f'd up XP GUI (it's not even different in that it looks as good or better, it's different in that it looks like it was some crappy early beta of XP).

At one time, wasn't Longhorn supposed to be out, with all its revolutionary features intact, in 2004? Now it's set for "late 2006" in its trimmed down form, and all we have are some lame screenshots?

People go nuts about a 0.1 incremental upgrade to the Mac OS, and are only too happy to pay $130 for it.

First, a .1 in Mac OS X is not the same as an SP in Windows. Second, we've actually *seen* the improvements in Tiger, not just in GUI screenshots, but also in video demonstrations, and textual descriptions of features it *actually has*. With Longhorn, after *years* of "It's gonna be so f'ing cool!" we have screenshots that are worse looking than XP, and that's it?

Longhorn is a far more important and comprehensive upgrade than Tiger

That's not obvious, which is the whole point. Longhorn isn't just XP v2, it's this *huge* new thing that makes every other thing that existed before seem like an etch-a-sketch, or something. So we're at the public unveiling of the beta and we have an ugly version of the XP GUI, and... that's it? It wasn't even worth the time to click the link, except to learn how *little* progress MS has made.

and all anyone can say about it is how much it sucks because it looks like Windows?

Well, Windows isn't exactly considered the paragon of GUI design.

If the computer looks exactly the same, then what's the difference? I mean, eventually the new features have to make their way known in some way, otherwise there's no point in them. Maybe the differences are in speed, or in some transitional effects (although, if that's all, that's not really that big a deal), which are hard to capture in sceenshots, but the only thing that stuck out to me was the search field in Explorer (which has been in Mac OS X since 2002). We hear great things about the new search function (although it keeps getting pared down), and Avalon, and... is there anything else left anymore?

Well, your talk is getting tired, MS. It's time to show us what you've come up with.