Down at the bottom of Bill Gates" keynote to the Professional Developers Conference yesterday lies confirmation that the wheels have come off the Windows rollout wagon. Again. Actually, we all already knew that the Big One, Blackcomb, has been knocked back in the general direction of 2005, and we already knew that the interim XP+1, Longhorn, was 2003, but Bill saying it - or something pretty close to it, anyway - is confirmation that it"s going quiet for a while, and there will be no interim release next year.
Probably. Practically all of the Blackcomb delayed stories track back to Gartner saying so, and Gartner, like The Register, finds it difficult to believe that Microsoft will be able to resist another revenue-enhancing hit at the consumer market next year. Bill however (who told us Blackcomb would be 2002 at the same venue last year) now says: "2003 is the next major milestone for us in terms of the Windows release. That will be a very important release, a lot going on in the peer-to-peer, a lot going on in the advanced presentation environment there. We"ll have a round of servers that are timed with that, and of course we"ll be able to go with the major new version of the tools that match up with that and a major new version of the services."
Even then, the Blackcomb rev will be another two years off at least. Blackcomb is intended to have built-in database technology, and to be the real .NET OS, so the reality of .NET is clearly a good way off yet. And isn"t it interesting that the "nearly" stage in 2003 syncs nicely with what InterTrust was telling us about the real impact point of .NET the other day?