I will be writing much more extensively on this
here. But I must make a few brief points.
I spent the better part of a week with the developers of Longhorn. Yes, I attended the same Keynote that you can see
here. But I also spent quite a bit of time with Joe Peterson, Vice President of Product Development for the Windows division and Shanen Boettcher, director of Longhorn development. My conversations with them occurred over lunch and I spoke at length with Boettcher, both at a table with about 10 people as well as one-on-one over coffee.
It was a real eye-opening experience. I challenged them to respond to the criticisms being leveled at them by the press and public: it's taking too long, it's a copy of Tiger, they can't meet the dates, features have been stripped out, etc. I came away with a new understanding of what really goes on in Redmond and what is in store over the next year.
Much of what we heard has been or will be in the press. You may or may not come across these accounts, but they put to rest many of the arguments against LH. But some of what I heard was in private conversation, not meant for dissemination to the public.
Like you, I was skeptical too. And, as a journalist, I certainly have no reason nor desire to suddenly praise everything that MS has done with LH. But I am all about facts. And much of the "noise" about LH is lacking in facts.
For one thing, there seems to be a huge misunderstanding about what 5048 actually is. It is not meant to be the state-of-the-art of Longhorn development. It is certainly not meant to be anyone's primary OS. It is just a sampling of some features that were either not present in 4074 or have been refined since then. Some bugs have been fixed. But anyone who expected this Build to be anything close to the final OS is sadly mistaken.
The reality is that Beta 1 will, indeed, be pretty much up-to-date in LH development. There will be a big difference between 5048 and Beta 1. Many of the features that will ultimately make it into LH will be in Beta 1. And Beta 2 will pretty much have them all. So there will be a huge leap from 5048 to Beta 1. What people were expecting to come out in 5048 will, in fact, be present in Beta 1. Expectations of 5048 were way too high.
It was mentioned earlier but bears repeating: Longhorn is still 18 months away, and for people to be looking at this Build and saying "gee, this isn't that impressive -- Longhorn will just be a glorified XP" is just goofy. That's like looking at a clay model of a car and saying, "this doesn't look like it will be the Mustang we hoped it would be."
The most impressive features of Longhorn aren't even in the Build we have now. Some won't even be in Beta 1. I just don't understand why people are expecting so much out of this Build. High expectations lead to disappointment, and unfortunately, most people's expectations were way too high.
I saw previews of some of Longhorn's capabilities, features not yet in the Build, which will put to rest any notion that LH is just a "glorified XP."
People complain about the lack of themes. Well, LH will have skinning support. What you do now with a hack will be built into the OS. People complained about the Sidebar. The Sidebar is dead. It has been pulled. People complained about WinFS being pulled, asuming that the search features we had heard so much about were gone. That couldn't be further from the truth. WinFS was a misnomer. MS unfortunately focused on developer terms and not end-user terms. "WinFS" really refers to the ability of developers to extend metadata, to customize search features for their own applications. That's what was pulled. But everything we had been told would be in Longhorn will be in Longhorn. The search features are there. The idea that "1/3 of Longhorn is gone," that the OS was being stripped down, was just plain wrong. It was an unfortunate choice of terms and unclear representation to the media which caused the press and public to believe that the search features were not going to be included. We saw them demonstrated and they are impressive indeed. And they will be there.
I could go on and on. As far as dates go, they are set in stone. I heard that over and over and over, both privately and publicly. Beta 1 will be out this summer, Beta 2 in the fall, and Longhorn will ship next Summer for public availability in the Holiday 2006 season. If Product teams do not meet their deadlines, they will be fired. plain and simple. MS has learned from the past and they know that if they don't meet those dates, they will lose a lot of stock in the marketplace. I would bet on it.
Until Apple Machintosh or IBM (IBM promotes & sponsors Redhat Linux) get their operating systems preinstalled on newbie computers. We are all stuck with the fact that Microsoft releases the most used operating system in the world.
In the final analysis, they're comparing something which is basically a buggy version of XP with a couple of extra features, a placeholder GUI which is nothing like the final GUI as it will be released, and a major new presentation model (Aero) that so far has no meaningful software support (because the OS release date is still some years ahead, d'oh!) --- and a fully operable Operating System with full software support from the manufacturer.
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