Last Thursday Steven Bink had an interview with Barry Goffe and Jon Murchinson who are part of the Windows division in Redmond and responsible for the product
The interview was by telephone so he had some issues talking and typing the notes at the same time. Below are the notes converted to an article.
Barry started to explain what the focus Eiger really is: The goal is providing a better solution for certain type of customers and their legacy pc"s.
Companies that have 5-6 year old pcs that still run NT4 or win9x. These customers are not upgrading their hardware for financial or business-political reasons, but they are concerned about security, NT4 and win9x are not patched anymore, since Microsoft does not support these OS"es.
Manageability of these different OS"es can be hard or it not at all. Windows XP does not run on these systems. Microsoft heard these issues and began thinking what they could do. Eiger is the solution for this, the latest OS for legacy PC"s. A Stripped down version of Windows XP that runs on these old PC"s and can be managed by client management tools like SMS and SUS.