Microsoft&#39;s One-Two Punch: Longhorn in 2006, WinFS Later
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Microsoft promises -- in 2006. The market expected the new desktop operating system in 2004, but the company was distracted with security concerns as it marshaled its forces to finish the Windows XP Service Pack 2.
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A look back at where hard drives have been--and where they're going.
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Microsoft has said the next release of Windows will still be worth the upgrade, even though Longhorn has been stripped of its unified file system and some of its other key technologies will be available for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.
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(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.
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Developer reaction to Microsoft&#39;s decision to hold off on delivering planned parts of the next release of Windows Longhorn to meet the 2006 deadline has been mixed, with many calling it a prudent move and others outright upset by the decision.
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Microsoft Corp. will drop a much-touted new technology for organising and storing data when it releases the next version of its Windows operating system as expected in 2006.
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Microsoft on Friday set late 2006 as the deadline when it will ship Longhorn, the next major version of Windows. But to make that date, it had to delay the full implementation WinFS, an ambitious file system
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Once a hailed as a cornerstone of Longhorn, WinFS has continually been pushed back with CNET claiming that it could be &quot;several more years &quot; before it actually makes its way into actual operating systems.
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Microsoft Corp. will drop a much-touted new technology for organizing and storing data when it releases the next version of its Windows operating system as expected in 2006.
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SEPTEMBER 06, 2004  - The next major Windows release, code-named Longhorn, is due to arrive so far into the future that many corporate users aren&#39;t particularly bothered by Microsoft Corp.
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Drives in PCs and media centres from 2005
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NEW YORK, September 1 (New Ratings) - Microsoft (MSFT.NAS) reportedly intends to ship Longhorn, its next version of Windows operating system, without WinFS, the next-generation file system.
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Microsoft today announced a significant change in plans for the next major release of Windows, code-named Longhorn. The new WinFS storage subsystem will not be part of it, as had been previously planned.
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With an absence of fanfare, but otherwise on schedule, Microsoft opened up its download page for Service Pack 2 of Windows Server 2003, both 32-bit and 64-bit editions. Perhaps most importantly, enterprises won't have to wait until Longhorn to be able to utilize Windows Deployment Services, the company's new image-based system for pre-composed, remote Windows installations.
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Microsoft Corp. MSFT.O said on Friday  it will ship the next version of Windows in 2006, but  scaled  back plans to include a new system for finding and storing  information in its flagship operating system.
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Microsoft Corp. said it plans to release the next version of its Windows operating system as expected in 2006, but it will not include much-touted new technology for organizing and storing data.
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Microsoft has set 2006 for the official launch of its Longhorn operating system, which will debut without several of the features originally planned.