Sleepless In Seattle

Continued from '64-Bit: Here It Comes'….

Now for Longhorn. What a disappointment. The Aero eye candy looks nice, but it'll be offered on XP too, and it mimics an experience that has already existed in Mac OS X for years. So too with the much-vaunted Desktop Search; Spotlight does the same thing in Tiger (Mac OS 10.4, due for public launch on Friday), with no file keyword tagging required, and a number of companies (among them Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft themselves) have already unveiled products that tackle this task under existing Windows operating systems. WinFS is also decoupled from Longhorn and, according to current plan, will support XP too.

Perhaps the most pathetic moment in the pitch (and trust me, there were many, this was a tough call) came when a Microsoft shill excitedly pointed out that it was possible to launch Solitaire by typing 'SOLI' into the search box. Need I say more? I thought not. If you really want to see how lame it was for yourself, you can view a stream of the keynote in three different Windows Media Video bitrate options. I'd heard the Longhorn pitch before, and been underwhelmed before. I thought it'd be different this time. I mean, these are developers. Microsoft's bread and butter, the secret to its success. There's got to be at least one more rabbit in that hat, right? Nope, at least based on what I heard yesterday. Although, as you'll soon see, Microsoft's got plenty of time to yank out more rabbits (live? dead? stuffed?)before the Longhorn cake is fully baked.

About the only thing I heard about Longhorn that remotely perked my ears was the fact that user accounts won't need to run in Administrator mode as often; more user-specific settings can be modified under tighter-security account options, and when absolutely necessary a user can temporarily enter an Administrator account password to complete the desired operation. Frankly, this is nothing more than an after-the-fact patch for a situation that never should have developed; the blame for the current mess resides both with Microsoft and with rogue third-party software developers that didn't follow Microsoft's recommendations when developing their applications. And yes, Longhorn mimics Mac OS X here as well; any user change attempt prompts for a password before it's allowed to complete.

We all received a 'developer preview' version of Longhorn at the show; a broader-distribution Beta 1 is slated for sometime this summer. Beyond that, things get fuzzy fast….there's a Beta 2 on the timeline, albeit with no assigned date, and Microsoft hopes to get the O/S out the door in time for the holiday 2006 shopping season. Longhorn, whenever it appears, will be an obvious mate for new hardware. But an upgrade for existing O/S seats? Nahhh. Now that XP SP2 is out, Microsoft has achieved a good-enough bar that it'll be unable to clear with Longhorn. Ironically, they've done so well with XP SP2 that they've obsoleted themselves. But, in the interests of full disclosure, I thought the same thing about 98SE. We shall see.