The latest Longhorn rumors

Michael Gartenberg | March 03, 2004, 09:39 AM

From Scoble, a rumor that Longhorn won't ship before 2008. This is getting silly. First, OS ship predictions are a waste of time. Making comments like this on the basis of "it's just a guess" and "I was right about Windows 2000" (for the record, I was at Gartner at the time and it was the OS research group there that was the first to publicly call that delay of the product that became Windows 2000). The truth is that it doesn't matter when Longhorn ships. IT doesn't matter that there might be an interim version of XP (and that interim version will be nothing like Windows ME). What matters is that Microsoft is no going for the longest period in recent history without a major OS release. Way back in 2000, I had conversations with MSFT execs who pointed to a new unified OS/Server release cycle every eighteen months. I thought that was a bit aggressive. This gap is way too large but represents an opportunity for Microsoft (and an opportunity for competitors if they don't act).

1. First Microsoft needs to recognize the market has been slow to adopt XP and needs to change that. There needs to be a renewed effort to get older machines retired, both business and consumer as well as get business customers to get on to XP. There are lots of business XP licenses that are not deployed and should be.

2. Emphasize the need for a managed, near homogeneous environment that lowers costs and allows for easy and cheap change management.

3. Release the interim version of XP that rolls the enhancements and hot fixes and all other good stuff to date and get folks to use it. XP is the best and the most secure OS Microsoft has ever released. It's a shame so little of the market uses it.

4. Cut the Longhorn talk for now. Focus on the power of XP. It's a no-brainer if you're on any prior MSFT OS and Microsoft's lack of marketing is shameful. Longhorn is supposedly to XP what XP is to 98/95. Great, the problem is MSFT hasn't been able to tell the market about the XP/98 differential much less what a future one might look like.

There's a perfect storm brewing that Microsoft's competitors can potentially exploit if Redmond doesn't act. Leaving a market stalled on Windows 98 is the potential disaster and won't be remedied by shipping Longhorn.

The latest rumor is that Longhorn won't ship until 2008 (helped along by ZDNet's Jim Louderback). [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]