While Microsoft has been beating the Longhorn drum at recent events, at Tech Ed next week the vendor will concentrate on current and soon-to-be-launched products, and will have little to say about the next major Windows release expected in 2006. Microsoft is shifting the focus back to the here and now at its Tech Ed event in San Diego, in contrast to its Longhorn-themed Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles last year and the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in Seattle earlier this month, which also had plenty of sessions on Longhorn.
PDC was over-hyped, said Dave Burke, a senior software developer at LLI Technologies Inc., an engineering and construction company in Pittsburgh. "We have real-world applications that must be written using today's technology. ... Longhorn is essentially a lot of background noise," he said. And while Microsoft isn't that outspoken, Senior Product Manager Harley Sipner said Tech Ed is much more about what is available now or in the very next version of a software product. "PDC is often about tomorrow and Tech Ed is really about today," he said. The absence of Longhorn at Tech Ed is a sign that Microsoft is getting back to what matters for its customers and itself, said Joe Wilcox, a senior analyst at Jupiter Research in Washington, D.C.
News source: InfoWorld
