Thanks neo1980 for this one posted in BPN.
Yes folks it"s spring in Seattle at last, the moss has gone green, and the Redmond marketing team is busy altering perceptions by dispensing prestige exclusive executive access to prestige publications. The second of the week so far is Bill himself, in Fortune, painting a rosy (albeit staggeringly vague) picture of Longhorn. Who"s next? Steve? But everybody gets Steve...
Anyways, immediately the obvious bottom line of Bill"s disclosures to Fortune writer Brent Schlender is that Longhorn, once upon a time the intermediate point release on the way from Windows XP to Blackcomb, the real big one, is now not-a-point-release, but is instead "a radically new version of Windows, code-named Longhorn, which, if all goes well, will come out sometime after 2005."
Much about Microsoft"s wondrous OS roadmapping procedure beggars belief, but this one raises the bar (as they say in Redmond) on beggary. Unless Brent has got the date down wrong we"re talking about the next major rev shipping in 2006 earliest, which given commercial realities would mean a rollout in Q2-Q3 2006, which means a gap of getting on for five years from XP to Longhorn, which means we"re likely to have not one but two point releases between now and then.