Page III: Microsoft's OS is in development, and Bob Muglia has little latitude for more slips.
Jim Allchin told us that some features of Longhorn won't be in the first release. Was he referring to WinFS?
There were two aspects that Jim was talking about. One is areas of maturity, associated with what you would expect from an enterprise-class file system that we are going to continue to work on. The other is that there were a lot of dreams that people had inside of Microsoft for what Longhorn Server would do. There is a natural process, whereby as a release transitions from the early dream stage into the reality stage, in which functionality and the scenarios get cut back. Jim was referring to some of those things. That's part of the natural process that every release goes through.
Will those features be in the next major release of Windows Server, code-named Blackcomb? Or will they be in an update release to Longhorn?
I expect that the update release of Longhorn Server will be the time when we will be able to mature much of WinFS.
How much of Microsoft's Windows development team is working on, say, Longhorn as opposed to the R2 update release to Windows Server 2003?
It's hard to answer exactly how much of our resources are devoted to R2 versus Longhorn. Our branch office team, for instance, is almost 100 percent focused on R2. The interface development team is almost 100 percent on Longhorn. The release teams are working on things in parallel, but have a tendency to focus on short-term things. Virtually all of the release resources are on XP SP2 (Service Pack 2) now, which will ship this summer, and then on SP1 (Service Pack 1) (for Windows Server 2003), which will ship later this year. If you had to pin me down for a number, I'd say it's 50-50 when all is said and done. But it varies so much by teams.
Have you begun to think about Blackcomb, even though it likely won't debut until next decade?
In fact, I'm starting to think about Blackcomb. I've been meeting with teams, saying, "Let's talk." If Indigo (a major feature of Longhorn) took four years to develop, some major infrastructure things inside Blackcomb will also take four years to develop. The amazing thing about that is that there isn't much time to get that done ... It takes an airplane or a space subsystem or something to compare with developing Windows, in terms of complexity associated with some of these things. We have this huge set of interoperability and other things that we need to think about, as we move things forward.
Can you tell us what's on Blackcomb's feature list?
My top priority is continuing to drive the Dynamic Systems Initiative (for systems management) part of the equation. While we have all of these great short-term deliverables for DSI, there is a lot more we can do. We're taking the concept of transferring information across the life cycle of the business application and ingraining it in as part of the process. DSI is all about information transfer between a developer, the operations center and the end user. There are ways to do that on a surface level, and there are ways to build that deeper into the OS, and that's what we are doing.
An opportunity to change things every two years, these guys are cutting edge !