Mixed feelings about the splitting out of features on Longhorn

re: Mixed feelings about the splitting out of features on Longhorn

Jonathan — Mon, 21 Mar 2005 05:45:00 GMT

Making the various pillars available on XP/2003 will greatly benefit ISVs in vertical industries, such as the company I work for--If Avalon were Longhorn-only, we probably wouldn't start using it in our apps until at least 2010. Now, since it wil be available downlevel, we can.

Microsoft is exactly right in calling these "pillars." The aren't the operating system itself, they are what the OS is developed on. I've gotten to see the PDC 03 Longhorn shell (built on WinFS), and it was pretty amazing. Moving WinFS to XP won't enable that, and it's too bad people think that having the pillars on XP removes incentive for moving to Longhorn.

re: Mixed feelings about the splitting out of features on Longhorn

Michael Kaplan — Mon, 21 Mar 2005 06:10:00 GMT

No arguments -- several of my eight hands even agree with you, Jonathan!

And also (as I pointed out), we have been doing this in GIFT since long before anyone else wa talking about working downlevel -- it did not raise a stir since we did not pre-announce any of it first at that PDC. :-)

re: Mixed feelings about the splitting out of features on Longhorn

Senkwe — Mon, 21 Mar 2005 11:07:00 GMT

I think the backporting to XP was a wise decision. I think the reasoning MS will expect of developers is "If you think my app rocks on XP, wait till you see it on Longhorn".

Having said that, I get the feeling LH will be a dud pretty much. My assumption is that most MS employees have seen various builds of the OS and yet you never see any MS employees going "wow LH rocks, wait till you see how cool it is!!". (Except Scoble, but thats his job) Not even a hint that it's a revolutionary OS (And yes, your blog, entertaining as it is, falls into this category) :-)

re: Mixed feelings about the splitting out of features on Longhorn

Michael Kaplan — Mon, 21 Mar 2005 11:20:00 GMT

Ah, but I could be one of those people who ain't talking yet, right? :-)

Though I have actually said things about Longhorn already, in presentations for Unicode, GDDC, IMUG, and elsewhere. We can't talk about everything, but as even this article states, I believe that many people will consider the language functionality to be pretty compelling....

I leave it to marketing to say what is revolutionary or not (that is mostly spin anyway). :-)

re: Mixed feelings about the splitting out of features on Longhorn

Larry Osterman — Tue, 22 Mar 2005 04:01:00 GMT

Senkwe,
Wait until after the next major round of conferences, etc. The reason that nobody's particularly talking about LH is that most of the LH people are busy makeing it be really cool.

I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.