Microsoft targets 2006 for Windows Longhorn
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On Friday Microsoft announced the target date for the much anticipated Windows Longhorn client operating system--broad availability for the updated operating system is targeted for 2006.
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Microsoft is in a throw-it-off-the-train state of mind these days in regard to its Windows operating system features. It&#39;s announced that Longhorn will ship by 2006 -- but without its much-ballyhooed WinFS subsystem.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The next version of the Windows  operating system, Microsoft Corp.'s MSFT.O flagship product,  will ship in 2006, the world's largest software maker said on  Friday.
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Forget another five-year wait for the next version of Windows. Microsoft has shared a few details of its next-generation operating system, tentatively named "Windows 7," due in 2010.
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AUGUST 27, 2004  - Microsoft Corp. today announced a significant change in plans for the next major release of Windows, code-named Longhorn.
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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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Microsoft Corp. announced yesterday that it will leave out some planned features from its next major operating system to meet a goal of rolling out a new version of Windows in the second half of 2006.
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Microsoft Corp. (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) said on Friday it will ship the next version of Windows in 2006, but scaled back plans to include a new system for finding
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The new version of Windows is about to make its debut for businesses. Here's what you can expect.
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Microsoft said Friday that it is delaying the release of a new data-storage technology, named WinFS, from the next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn, in order to deliver the operating system by 2006.
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Microsoft Corp. announced yesterday that it will leave out some planned features from its next major operating system to meet a goal of rolling out a new version of Windows in the second half of 2006. -The Washington Post
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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. on Friday said it has scaled back the next major release of the Windows operating system, code-named Longhorn, opting to drop the next-generation file system, so it can ship the OS in 2006.
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Microsoft is offering yet another glimpse at its oft-delayed Longhorn edition of Windows. Two new concept videos have been posted to the MSDN Web site that demonstrate potential real-life scenarios for the software giant's next generation operating system. The demos -- one geared towards telecoms and the other toward governments -- take a detailed look at longhorn's core technologies and discuss its promised benefits. Longhorn is expected to ship sometime in 2006; although, pundits are questioning Microsoft's ability to deliver on its key components like the WinFS file-storage system and the Avalon graphical subsystem.