Security concerns are slowing things down at Microsoft, but the company is still chugging along with its more ambitious projects including Windows Longhorn, a company executive said on Tuesday.
The need to make its current software more resilient to attack is part of the reason that several projects have fallen behind schedule, Senior Vice President Bob Muglia said in an interview. "It"s absolutely slowed things down," Muglia said at the Microsoft Management Seminar here. "This work is making our software come out not as quickly."
Notably, Microsoft said last week that key updates to its developer tools and to its SQL Server database will be postponed until next year, a move that has the potential to delay a number of other Microsoft software programs whose development is linked to those programs. There is also concern that Microsoft"s work on Longhorn-- the next version of Windows--will be further delayed or scaled back. Muglia said the company has not lost its drive to take on big projects like Longhorn. "We"re still pretty ambitious," he said. Muglia said that more than half of the resources on the Windows team are still going toward Longhorn, though more effort than originally planned is going into improving existing versions.