2004 has not been a kind year for Longhorn. Awash as it is in ever-increasing delays, Longhorn has been the subject of barbs from even the most dimmed-minded computer industry columnists, many of whom have begun comparing the Longhorn release to Cairo, Microsoft's aborted mid-1990's object-oriented OS project. And no wonder: Like Cario, Longhorn was to have included the technological equivalent of the kitchen sink, and then some. Clearly, something in Longhorn had to give.
And give it has. As I wrote over three years ago in my assessment of the development of Windows 2000, Microsoft works better when it tackles projects in small steps. "If there's a lesson to be learned here, and I believe there is, it's that the development of monolithic operating systems is over," I wrote. "While Windows 2000 is a great product, its development time and complexity is just too much to ask of customers. In the future, Microsoft will need to work off of a stable base, adding features on a yearly basis. For example, Microsoft should have developed Active Directory and IntelliMirror separately, releasing these products when they were ready. Asking customers to wrap their minds around all of the new features and changes in Windows 2000 is simply too much to ask." Now replace "Windows 2000" with "Longhorn" and "Active Directory and IntelliMirror" with "Avalon and Indigo," and you'll see what I mean. Longhorn was just too big.
As of now, however, that's no longer true. On the afternoon of Friday, August 27, 2004, Microsoft revealed what industry observers had long suspected: The company is now going to pare down its Longhorn release and ship some previously key technologies separately from the massive new OS. But even though the official announcement pretty much lays out this new plan succinctly, there were indications that Microsoft was heading in this direction previously:
It will never ship. No Microsoft product has ever been delayed as much as Longhorn, and as its ship date slipped from 2004 to 2005 to 2006 and even, according to some rumors, to 2007, Longhorn became less exciting to users and more the object of ridicule.
Office 12. Originally planned as a Longhorn-specific release that would ship alongside the Longhorn client release, Office 12 has been changed dramatically since last fall. First, Office 12 would only run on Longhorn. Then, Microsoft announced that it would ship Office 12 for both Longhorn and Windows XP in order to benefit a wider range of users. Now, Microsoft plans to ship Office 12 well ahead of Longhorn.
The on-again, off-again Longhorn Server. Depending on who you asked, Longhorn Server would either trail the client by several years or would ship alongside the Longhorn desktop. This summer, I was told that Longhorn Server would ship about 9 months after Longhorn client. That schedule is apparently still intact under the terms of the new plan.
The breaking of the Fellowship. Since last fall, Microsoft has been preaching the three core pillars of Longhorn as being the WinFS storage engine, the Avalon presentation layer, and the Indigo Web services platform. These features, Microsoft said, were core to Longhorn and couldn't be taken out. During a series of meetings at the Microsoft campus earlier this month, however, I discovered that Indigo was almost completed and would potentially ship separately for Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) and Windows Server 2003. The news astounded me, as it proved Microsoft's earlier contention about the core pieces of Longhorn to be somewhat spurious. What ramifications, I wondered, would this development have on the future of Longhorn?
Back to square one. During the same set of meetings reference above, I discovered that the core Windows team, which had been working to componentized Longhorn, had given up and would restart their efforts using the Windows XP SP2 code base (previous Longhorn builds had utilized the Windows Server 2003 code base). This startling revelation suggested that even further delays for Longhorn could be expected, unless something dramatic happened.
And indeed, something dramatic has happened.
Change is good
According to Microsoft Lead Product Manager Greg Sullivan, the changes came about because of an internal review of where Longhorn was and where it was going. "Basically, coming off of Windows XP SP2, it was a logical time to take stock and evaluate the Longhorn project," he told me. "We needed to establish priorities, and see where we were. As a company, we learned a lot from SP2, and in conversations with our partners around that, and at the PDC with the deverloper community, we had a good handle on what they were expecting. We mapped out a very ambitious plan for Longhorn at the PDC, and we are absolutely on track to deliver on it. How we will get there, however has changed a little bit."
Here's what's changed.
New guidance on the delivery of Longhorn
Longhorn will ship in 2006, Microsoft says. But it won't just ship in 2006: It will be "broadly available" in 2006. That means that Longhorn will be available in early 2006, not in the waning days of that year. "We're providing guidance and clarity on the target release date," Sullivan told me, "which is something we'd never done before. We did issue some guidance on the beta releases, but not on the final release. So that's new. The clarification of our roadmap is good for customers, especially enterprise customers. The implication of our use of the language 'broadly available' is that we're targeting the first half of 2005, and are expecting it to happen around mid-2005. That clarification is a good thing."
Taking key Longhorn features downlevel to Windows XP and Windows Server 2003
Since the PDC last year, developers and ISVs have been practically begging Microsoft to port some of the key Longhorn technologies to Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 so that they can target a wider audience of users. Microsoft has acquiesced to those requests and will port the Avalon presentation layer and the Indigo Web services infrastructure, and the appropriate WinFX developer libraries, to XP and 2003. Those products will ship at the same time as Longhorn.
"We got strong feedback regarding a desire to see the delivery of WinFX elements downlevel," Sullivan told me. "It's the new platform. So we will deliver Avalon and Indigo on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. That's significant. Instead of waiting for Longhorn to be heavily deployed, developers can target these APIs to 100's of millions of PCs. So that's good news."
WinFS will not be included in the initial Longhorn release
One bit of bad news is that the oft-touted WinFS storage engine will not be included in Longhorn. However, there's been a bit of misconception about WinFS and which features it enables, and Sullivan was quick to clarify that. "Longhorn will still feature a very rich search experience," Sullivan said. "It's kind of a mistake to equate local search with WinFS. They are different platform elements. So local search will still happen, and we will still deliver a very compelling full text search in Longhorn, alongside new shell capabilities. This will provide some semblance of the 'Find My Stuff' experience. But it won't be the full relational store with deep integration and platform exposure via APIs. For end usrs, however, it will be the same. We will offer a very compelling user experience for local search inside of Longhorn."
WinFS will ship in beta form when Longhorn is released and will now ship simultaneously on both Longhorn client and Longhorn Server, the latter of which is due in 2007. This year-long delay actually answers a key customer request, because there was some confusion previously about whether WinFS would ship with Longhorn Server. Now, Microsoft is clearly telling us that WinFS is a key feature of Longhorn Server. Incidentally, existing Longhorn users will be able to get WinFS for free when it ships, though the delivery vehicle for that product has yet to be announced.
Also, unlike Avalon and Indigo, WinFS will not ship separately for Windows XP and 2003. This technology is for Longhorn-era products only.
The new schedule
Accordingly, Longhorn now has a new schedule. It's unlikely that Microsoft will issue any more pre-alpha or alpha builds of the product to the public, Sullivan told me. Instead, the Beta 1 release will be the next major milestone and it's now due in early- to mid-2005. There will be a PDC in 2005, but not this year. And Longhorn will hit the release candidate stage in early 2006 and likely ship to customers broadly by mid-2006. "The acceleration of delivery and the broadening of the distribution of Longhorn technologies should be taken as very good news," Sullivan concluded. And now, thanks to clearer schedule, we can accurately plan ahead.
Conclusions
I've been covering Microsoft long enough to be skeptical about even these revised plans, but given what I've heard about the development of the product recently, the new plan certainly makes sense. How the computing world will react after being promised tech nerdvana, however, remains to be seen. For a broad range of power users and technology enthusiasts, Microsoft's Longhorn promises have been severely diminished, even if it happened for good reasons. But I think it's important to keep one thing in perspective: Longhorn will still be a major Windows release, on both the client and the server, and with recent improvements to Mac OS X and Linux doing little to nip away at XP's technological and usability leads, Longhorn will likely still stand at the apex of personal computing when its ships. Put succinctly, though the kitchen sink approach is gone, Longhorn remains the OS technology to watch.
--Paul Thurrott
August 27, 2004
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