Longhorn to be Released in 2006, Sans WinFS
231249
skillio writes &quot;Everyone&#39;s favorite OS maven, Bill Gates, announced a release date for Longhorn on Friday. He confirms what many had suspected - Microsoft will attempt to complete this release in calendar year 2006.
602811
Even though Microsoftâs much-anticipated Longhorn has been stripped of its unified file system and some of its other key Longhorn technologies will be available for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, the next Windows release will still be worth the upgrade, according to Microsoft.
191377
(InfoWorld) - By now, everyone has heard how Microsoft plans to release the next Windows client OS, Windows 7, in 2010. But what the company is not making clear is what new features the OS will have, a topic thatÂ has become fodder for educated Windows 7 speculation. Analysts said Microsoft probably is keeping tight-lipped about what Windows 7 will look like because at this point, company engineers and executives don't even know. "They don't want to commit because they don't have a good idea what's in it," said Michael Silver, an analyst with Gartner. "We're three years out, so you can't really expect that much detail." Michael Cherry, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, said that with so many people still in the midst of upgrading to the latest client OS, Windows Vista, he's hesitant to speculate on what might be in the next OS. "We barely know the features of the one we just got," he said with a laugh. That said, Cherry is expecting less "earth-shattering" new features than improvements on some of the new ones found in Windows Vista, such as the Bitlocker encryption feature, which is currently hard for the average PC user to navigate. "You have to partition your hard drive and do a bunch of things, and you can only really today protect one drive, whereas many machines have more than one," he said. Cherry also pointed to a common hardware performance problem many users face because of Vista's "very large footprint." "It's one of the things they might want to address -- hardware utilization and performance," he said. "It's hard to put a big wrapper around that; it just needs to be better." One Microsoft executive gave a slight hint about what might turn up in Windows 7 earlier this year at the RSA Conference in San Francisco. Ben Fathi, corporate vice president of development with Microsoft's Windows Core Operating System Division, said in an interview that a "fundamental piece of enabling technology," such as a hypervisor or a drastic change in the user interface, would likely turn up in Windows 7. Fathi also said at RSA in February that Microsoft was in the middle of the planning process for Windows 7's features and would know more over the next few months, which suggests the company now has a good idea what the OS will look like but is declining to disclose that information. While both a hypervisor and a new user interface are possibilities for Windows 7, the former is almost a given, Gartner's Silver said. "It almost has to go" in the OS, he said, describing the technology as "a really thin OS" that manages virtual machines running on the system. It would behoove Microsoft to put a hypervisor in Windows 7 because it would give them more control over the hardware the OS runs on, something the company would prefer to have, Silver said. "The hypervisor really owns the hardware, and Microsoft likes owning the hardware, and they want to be one of the people to standardize [hypervisor technology]," he said. Vista includes such newÂ features as desktop search and a new user interface, which also are two areas that leave room for expansion in Windows 7, analysts said. Microsoft has shown the direction it's going with the latter with itsÂ Surface computer, introduced in late May. That form factor looks like a coffee table with a touchscreen interface that lets users move photos around by hand and synchronize devices by placing them on the table. With products like the Apple iPhone making the touchscreen popular with consumers, a touchscreen UI in Windows 7 is a possibility, Silver said. "They don't want to look bad next to Apple," he said. Desktop search, a new feature built into Vista, also has room for improvement. Microsoft has said it will link desktop search to Windows Server 2008 so desktop users can search not only for local files but also for files on the server. This is a feature that potentially could be built into the desktop OS. Robert McMillan in San Francisco contributed to this article.
431306
Microsoft's next version of Windows, due in 2006, is code-named Longhorn. Last week, after Microsoft said it is postponing what would've been the most profound new feature of Longhorn, the tech comedians started calling the coming operating system Shorthorn.
109016
Microsoft wants to release its Longhorn client operating system in 2006 in order to &quot;appease&quot; the customers that have bought into its Software Assurance licensing package, according to analyst Gartner.
30356
p2pnet.net News:- By the time Microsoft finally un-corrals Longhorn, a significant portion of its potential customer base will be long gone.
264474
In June, I wrote a short series on Microsoft&#39;s next major operating system release, codenamed Longhorn. I raved about the much-anticipated WinFS file system that was supposed to replace the existing file system with a more robust SQL-based version.
232881
SAN FRANCISCO--Microsoft continues to tweak a controversial architecture for securing PCs but still plans to include the feature in Longhorn, the next release of Windows.
106132
LOS ANGELES (CBS.MW) -- Microsoft said Friday that it plans to broadly distribute the next version of its Windows operating system -- dubbed &quot;Longhorn&quot; -- in 2006, but conceded that it had to pare down a much-anticipated search feature to move ahead with
163345
Microsoft has decided to remove a key feature of its next major Windows operating system, codenamed Longhorn, in order to keep its 2006 shipping deadline intact.
585030
As we suggested on Friday, two mainstays of Windows Longhorn will be &#39;decoupled&#39; from the 2006 release, with Microsoft dropping the WinFS storage and query system.
285133
Windows? Linux? Mac OS? One day it won't matter.
331155
However, because it is coming out earlier, Longhorn will be trimmed of some of the more innovative stuff that has been seen in earlier builds.
648991
Microsoft has announced that start shipping its next version of its Windows operating system in 2006. However to meet the new tight deadline a number of technical innovations will have to be dropped from the OS.
433894
Microsoft Corp. may choose never to release its vaunted and long-overdue project WinFS, following its removal from the next version of Windows, according to analysts Gartner Inc.
415436
Microsoft's CEO lends some insight into the 2006 release date of the slow-moving next version of Windows.
462748
Microsoft (MSFT:Nasdaq - news - research) on Friday made official its plans to release its next Windows upgrade in 2006, although the software will be missing one of its key features.