Microsoft plans in April to offer developers an updated test version of Longhorn, along with more details on what’s in store with the next major update to Windows.
Microsoft to give developers a new look at Longhorn
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
…when longhorn arrives. Previews of Longhorn are now LongWorn.
this is gonna be good! nxt year is still to far away
by end of 2005 i guess
longhorn is the last chance for MS
4015 was the build for WinHEC 2003
4074 was the build for WinHEC 2004
So it has been almost a year since the last public build, it will be interesting to see what they spent the year doing.
Yeah it sure is, i mean except for the 95% market share in desktop operating systems, almost 90% in office software and the billions upon billions in cash the company has, longhorn is their last chance.
MS is one sorry company. They are so not moving fast enough with Longhorn, but they have to “show off” just to keep us entertained….. sorry Bill, I am not waiting for it.
Oh, wait, wasn’t the Longhorn coming out party already held?
I Like Linux and am writing this from XFCE 4.2 on gentoo. Well this does not make me hate windows, neither can I uninstall windows from my hard disk. Many of my company specific application require me to run windows. Its not that i cannot work in Linux, but windows just makes it easier ( for instance even with ~x86 cups, sometimes my network printer does not work for me– with windows its always is a single attempt job). As I work always on Thinkpad ( which I always shut down at night), I dont leave my computer running for longer than 10 hours and its Linux which soemtimes hangs ( while running wine application – the UI sometimes hangs and have to kill complete X, to restore) I never had a hang with WinXP. I think k3b is good, but its Nero that i use for CD burning. All said and done, it is linux that i am writing this comment from. I absolutely love the flexibility provided by XFCE, but respect the work developers put in developing windows.
Please avoid statements like “MS is a sorry company” —.
It is a great company, whose software I have used to get aquainted with computer and I respect it for this fact.
> Yeah it sure is, i mean except for the 95% market share in desktop
> operating systems, almost 90% in office software and the billions upon
> billions in cash the company has, longhorn is their last chance.
Funny that … there seem to be an awful lot of people at the moment who actually know what they’re talking about smelling blood in the water. Guess which company it’s coming from.
“…when longhorn arrives. Previews of Longhorn are now LongWorn.”
LOL! HA!
Actually I am looking forward to it! I am pretty sure that MacOSX 10.5 will be released shortly thereafter not that MS cares. I like the competiton but kind of wondering why Avalon is being revised so that it works with XP also. This doesn’t sound good. How good of a GPU will you need on the PC side not that it will be an issue for systems that have a current ATI or NVIDIA card, forget about Avalon with onboard video. MacOSX actually functions fine on a low end GPU.
> Funny that … there seem to be an awful lot of people at the moment who actually know what they’re talking about smelling blood in the water. Guess which company it’s coming from.
Oh, it’s not like that hasn’t happened before…
This is practically bound to be written at some future date:
OSXII running on a quad-core G6 is Apple’s last chance.
*yawn*
I tend to gauge the success of something not based on the so-called experts’ predictions but instead on the quality of people who are for/against it. On the “for” side I see a lot of hopeful, open-minded people who are waiting to see what will be in the next build. On the “against” side I see a lot of idiots posting mindless vitriol about how Microsoft is doomed to failure.
Not that any of this discussion matters, of course. If the moderators have any sense at all, they’ll delete it so that people can actually talk about things that matter, like: what will/won’t be in Longhorn, how that will affect existing customers, etc. And they’ll at least try to keep the new discussion relatively sycophant-/basher- free.
…why Avalon is being revised so that it works with XP also…
Because Microsoft would be beyond foolish to not release Avalon for XP.
As has been stated numerous times, one of the reasons for Windows and Office dominance was not upgrading users; rather, it was because so many new customers were entering the market that the new user base was considerably larger than the existing user base. Consequently, backward compatibility was less important. When you will sell more of the current version of your product within the next year than your entire existing user base, compatibility just isn’t as important, new features are (so that the new users come to you instead of your competitor).
This is no longer the case, likely hasn’t been the case for over 5 years, and the computer market is saturated. There are still Windows 98 users, for heavens sake! Windows XP has the largest percentage, IIRC, but even after 3-4 years since it’s release XP doesn’t have 90% of the market; I think it’s more like 60% (please pardon my addled memory; it’s been awhile since I’ve seen this figure, it’s constantly changing anyway, and my l33t Google ski77s weren’t helping me — it’s a pity Google Zeitgeist doesn’t do OS breakdowns anymore).
Think about that. 3-4 years to achieve 60% penetration
So when Longhorn is released, how long will it take before a significant number of users are using it? Awhile. A long while, most likely, unless it’s so good it takes the entire world by storm (forgive me if I’m too sceptical to believe this will happen).
So, we have this new platform, Avalon, and you want developers to use it. What developer in their sane mind would start using something that won’t be usable by a majority of customers for 5-10 years? Seriously. That’s madness. Especially when you already have some developers balking at targeting .NET since it isn’t included with the OS yet…
Consequently, if Microsoft wants anyone to target Avalon, it needs to increase the user base. The easiest way to do that is to increase the number of platforms supported, which means supporting Windows XP (or praying for a miracle of Longhorn adoption). Microsoft, wisely, has chosen the former, which is why XP will get some Avalon support.
Isn’t the only thing left with Shorthorn is looks and a couple APIs? They stripped out everything else that was interesting (but already on another OS or will be by mid year).
No Avalon. No database file system (which BeOS had HOW long ago and Mac Tiger will have). The list of drop out features of Shorthorn goes on and on. Nothing worth seeing anymore.
Sabon,
BeOS and Tiger do not have a pure database filesystem. What WinFS is trying to accomplish is actually a very different implementation. Just because a standard file system supports queries to metatags and text with-in plain-text files does not make it a true database file system.
I don’t think MS is in any danger of losing marketshare from Longworn being overdue. I am looking forward to it myself and unlike Apple they are in different situations.
For Apple MacOSX 10.0 at least got people excited about X and slowed but did not stop defection to other OSs but 10.0 was an interesting but almost useless product. It was more of a technology preview and even with 10.1 MacOSX was not useable on a daily basis until it hit 10.2.
IMHO XP and 2K are the best OS on the X86 given that they are properly installed, configured and secured. Longworn being overdue will not stop people from continuing to use XP, 2K and even NT and 98.
“I tend to gauge the success of something not based on the so-called experts’ predictions but instead on the quality of people who are for/against it. On the “for” side I see a lot of hopeful, open-minded people who are waiting to see what will be in the next build. On the “against” side I see a lot of idiots posting mindless vitriol about how Microsoft is doomed to failure.”
Idiots on both sides of that argument. Don’t pretend like Windows doesn’t have raving fanatics of it’s own who can find NO fault with it, only with other OSes, especially if those OSes are OSS. Take our webmistress for example…
MS is one sorry company. They are so not moving fast enough with Longhorn, but they have to “show off” just to keep us entertained….. sorry Bill, I am not waiting for it.
So, what exactly are you waiting for? I mean, if Longhorn were to come out tomorrow, assuming you weren’t available, what exactly is going to be in there that you don’t have now, that actually matters? Truth is, if you’re not happy with Windows now and don’t need to use it for any particular reason, then go ahead and switch platforms. I don’t think there’s anything in Longhorn that will make you want to come back, unless that ugly-ass sidebar makes your nipples hard or something
When I said:
‘ …if Longhorn were to come out tomorrow, assuming you weren’t available’
I meant:
‘ …if Longhorn were to come out tomorrow, assuming you aren’t a developer‘
I wish we could go back to the 95/98 way of installing an os so that you are able to remove components you don’t want. Now, they just install everything.
This has to be the single most important thing I dislike about Microsoft’s newest OS’s.
I have a couple of questions I hope someone here can answer:
1.- Longhorn is based on .Net?
2.- Will be vulnerable to win32 viruses?
Thx.
> Idiots on both sides of that argument. Don’t pretend like Windows doesn’t have raving fanatics of it’s own who can find NO fault with it, only with other OSes, especially if those OSes are OSS. Take our webmistress for example…
I don’t recall pretending that Windows doesn’t have any sycophants. In fact, that’s the word I used to describe them in the post that you quoted. You should have read a bit further.
The original argument was about whether Longhorn was going to cost Microsoft dearly, turn out to be a win-win for Microsoft, or something in between. Perhaps I was not clear enough before: IMO there is too much flak coming from the anti-MS zealots for Longhorn to be the let-down they claim it will be. Just a hunch. I think we’ll have to wait and see what will actually be in Longhorn before we make any serious predictions, though.
If you want to broaden this argument into a discussion about whether Windows has problems, then I’d be happy to oblige you. However, it will still be off-topic. The news post was about Longhorn and so the comments here should have been an interesting technical discussion about it, not a gripe session for fools and malcontents. Maybe the OSS zealots would appreciate the OSS announcements here being flooded with anti-FSF/-RMS/-OSS/-Linux propaganda…?
Calling Eugenia a raving fanatic is silly, especially in light of the comments here. *rolls eyes* Usually when she gets angry, it’s because she is making constructive criticism about something, and a well-intentioned but immature OSS zealot misreads it as a personal attack on the whole OSS movement. Even if the criticism is about button labels or font sizes. Geez. Don’t you people have anything better to do?