But to make that date, it had to delay the full implementation of WinFS, an ambitious file system geared at letting users search through all of their files at once.
Whether Microsoft makes this latest deadline will likely be one of the dominant issues for the tech industry over the next two years. The operating system was originally expected in 2004, and many have predicted that further delays could dampen PC sales.
Meanwhile, the growing popularity of Linux has begun to nibble at Microsoft's dominance on the desktop, while Google has emerged as a major competitor on the Internet. Will Longhorn be dazzling enough to undercut these trends? The fate of the industry hangs in the balance.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates spoke exclusively with CNET News.com on Friday about how Microsoft handles deadlines and new opportunities.
Q: Can you give us a summary of what happened with Longhorn?
A: Windows is the most widely used piece of software in the world, and therefore, the diversity of things people do with it and the benefits to improving it are greater than certainly any piece of software that's ever been done. And we reflect that by having huge R&D investment in Windows.
The PDC (Professional Developers Conference) last year was where we really talked about the vision of Longhorn and all the different pieces. Of course, we had the SP2 work, which, because it was security-focused, we gave the highest priority to. We had the releases we'd always had planned, the Media (a new version of Windows XP Media Center) and Tablet.
And then, Jim (Allchin) and a guy who works for Jim, Brian Valentine, went through with everybody, and asked "OK, where are we? What's the feedback that we've gotten from ISVs (independent software vendors) and people?" And we went through this replanning process that has come out with the plan we're announcing today.
This is the first time we've actually given a date for when we'll ship the Longhorn operating system. It's always risky in a software project, especially one where the compatibility requirements and the scope of the features of what we deliver in versions of Windows are incredibly broad, but we've made enough progress. We've got enough methodology in place that we decided that was the right thing to do.
What are the changes?
We are, as you heard, taking one of the major pillars of Longhorn and changing how we deliver that. Actually, there are changes in all the pillars, but in the case of Indigo and Avalon, it's mainly the addition of the down-level support. All XP users, not just Longhorn users, will be able to download the software. It's not a tiny download, but it's the kind of download that is not unreasonable in today's world.
WinFS is where we made the biggest change. We realised that we could do a lot of rich search capabilities in the OS without the full database, taking some of our text technology that's been used by Office, and actually, MSN is doing some nearer-term local-search things, building on that same technology.
Anyway, we decided that we could integrate that and get a lot of the navigational benefits, and that the really deep benefits have to do with database style system unification -- bringing the SQL language and all of the XML access stuff together. We were only doing a pretty modest amount of that under the WinFS that was going to ship in the operating system.
And we never had, in the Longhorn plan, WinFS server support. We were clear about that going back all the way to the PDC.
So now, we're doing the search stuff in Longhorn '06, and then we're releasing WinFS off-cycle as a development platform and as sort of an information management shell synchronised with a release of the database server as well.
What's the reaction from the PC makers?
Certainly, we've been in discussions with key partners, both on the ISV side and with companies like Intel and Hewlett-Packard.
Every constituency sees a Windows release through the particular things of interest to it, which are different. So Intel wants great chip support, ultrawideband support, WiMax support, different power-throttling capabilities, multicore -- things like that. Anyway, we've been through the plan with them, and this plan is very good in the sense that they're glad to see Longhorn coming into focus, they're glad to see the commitment to the date, and the hardware kind of supports things that they want are in their plans.
What is really causing sort of the rewrite on Longhorn? Is it these sort of demands from the partners, is it the technological difficulties of the project, or is it even personnel and execution issues at Microsoft?
There's no rewrite going on here. WinFS, I'd be the first to say, is very ambitious. Nobody has ever brought together the world of documents, media and structured information in giving you one simple set of verbs that lets you richly find, move around and replicate those things.
Ever since about 15 months ago, when we moved Peter Spiro of our database group to take charge of WinFS, we've made very good progress. What happened here is, as we looked at the new things we wanted to add to WinFS, that would have only been consistent with an '07 schedule -- adding the tabular stuff and figuring out a server plan.
So we definitely were faced with a decision that Jim, Peter, Steve (Ballmer) and I were having a lot of dialogue over these last couple of weeks. What was the right thing? Was it to take Longhorn as a whole and get these super-cool additional WinFS features in, knowing that that would push the release out into '07, or was it to come up with a plan that was a bit more clever and really not give up much?
The plan we have does give up WinFS shipping with Longhorn. And so if you want my basic assessment here, the glass is three-quarters full.
The WinFS team, in terms of its progress and performance, is doing very, very good work, but it couldn't take the additional features and make an '06 schedule. That's professional engineering on its part, to stand up and say, "No, if you want us to have those features, we're an '07 deliverable."
It seems as if software is taking longer to bring to market. SP2 kind of grew in scope. Things like Yukon and Whidbey have taken more time. Has software just gotten more complicated to write? What, if anything, does Microsoft need to do as a company to reflect that reality?
Our scheduling and predictability on this project has been better than it was on OS 360 (the mainframe operating system created by IBM). So software has not gotten more complex. Software with this kind of scope of features and compatibility has always been complex. That's the business we're in.
The ongoing dialogue we always have with our customers, ISVs and OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) is always one of two kinds. One is (that) we have a date-driven release. Things that make that date get in. For MSN, most of what it does is date-driven releases. It does very regular releases because of the nature of its market, and it doesn't have the compatibility challenge.
With the operating system, customers want releases to be on the order of, I'd say, two to three years. Hardware exploitation, media, security and wireless expectations mean that you've got to have that release. But it's enough of a challenge, in terms of deployment, testing and other things, that you wouldn't want two major operating-system releases in less than (a) two-year period.
6%
2%
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Apple debuted OSX::Tiger a little while ago, and it included their new "Spotlight Search Technology", which "brings together the world of documents, media and structured information". Microsoft owns part of Apple; would it hurt them to at least keep up with what OSX is doing? Sheesh.