It’s a bit late to chime in with anything brilliantly unique and insightful (hell, I’d settle for just plain interesting) on the Longhorn news, because the media and blogging worlds are fairly abuzz over the Longhorn announcement and most angles have been covered down to the minutiae at this point. Scoble covered the coverage, as it were, here. As an aside, Scoble’s post is an worth reading just from its mea culpa perspective; like marketers, evangelists – even enthusiasts – can sometimes get burned by getting prematurely excited about a technology. Hence Scoble’s admission that he probably deserved being called out by Asa of Mozilla.
Anyway, rather than link to everything under the sun, here are the pieces I found most interesting:
“As a customer, why should I upgrade to Longhorn and not just settle for Avalon/Indigo on XP or 2003?”
I totally agree, and this is one of my two major questions about the news.
“Avalon is the most exciting piece of Longhorn to me (OK, its all exciting, and I cant wait for it to get here). Avalon is exciting because it gives UI designers a leap forward for the first time in nearly 20 years. Theyll be working on top of games-style graphics. While that sounds like a big yawn, it means that the widget makers have a whole new medium to work with. New widgets may also sound like a yawn. But a graphical user interface for the same programs we were running in text once also sounded like a yawn.”
WinFS was the most exciting portion for me, but I think her comments on Avalon are spot on and now will be relevant (barring – or pending – further changes) to XP users.
“As a developer I’m not surprised by the Longhorn announcement and I’m actually quite pleased.”
This seems to be the reaction of most developers I’ve seen. No surprise there, since the work they do tapping Avalon and Indigo will now be relevant to more than one platform.
“An ‘Avalon XP’ codebase… how will it be delivered? If it’s packaged as part of the normal security updates then this could reach a high percentage of users, just as Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 is being spread today. But if it’s not part of a security bundle, then the dynamics may be closer to that of a large web-browser plugin.”
Perhaps it’s natural that a Macromedia employee questions the delivery mechanism, but it’s a legitimate question and one that underscores my biggest question (see below).
Lots more interesting feedback out there, but the big question I haven’t seen anyone ask yet (please point me there if I missed it), is this. WinFS didn’t make it, fine. It’s a big hit, in my view, but I’ve developed (even if on a exponentially smaller scale) and sometimes you just can’t get everything you want. But how on earth is Microsoft going to release a revamped filesystem with database underpinnings off-cycle? I’m trying to envision a scenario where I hit Windows Update and WinFS shows up to be downloaded and applied to my operating system, and I just can’t see it. And this leads to a bigger question; is the intention really to release the technology in that fashion, or is this the spin to a larger decision that pretty much rules out the technology for the foreseeable future? If it’s the former, I’d encourage Microsoft to be as specific as it can with info, and if the latter, well, I always think bad news is better than no news or spun news. But maybe it’s just me. Either way, I think the question Steve Maine raised needs to be answered, and soon.
