Friday, June 17th, 2005, 3:27 pm
Longhorn: A Trainwreck?
Filed under: I have been following the writings of John Dvorak for several months and in his column, he expresses the main difficulty that Microsoft are now facing.
All we hear about Longhorn, though, seems to be about the removal of one promised feature after another…
…These were the fancy file structure, the new presentation manager, and a communications system—things that were going to make the OS a platform for what were described as Service-Oriented Applications (SOA).
Longhorn is often characterised as Service Pack 3 and it can motivate a large proportion of Windows users to seek alternative platforms. One might add the statistic that half of all businesses still use Windows 2000, so can Longhorn give a compelling reason to upgrade? Clearly this will be a serious hurdle to Microsoft.
After Apple’s recent switch to Intel, let us see if Mac OS becomes available to third parties. This can easily balance the cost of hardware with the added value of security.
Longhorn: screenshots of prototypes
