Scoble’s Link Blog

Longhorn’s Aero UI Won’t Debut Until PDC 2005

While attendees of the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) 2005 in April will be the lucky recipients of the first public Longhorn build in the 5xxx series, we’re going to have to wait until this fall before we see Longhorn’s futuristic Aero user interface debut. In an otherwise innocuous blog posting this week, Longhorn evangelist Robert Scoble suggests that the software giant will include Aero in the pre-Beta 2 build of Longhorn that it hands out at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in September, along with a few other surprises. It must have been a long year for Scoble: Microsoft last shipped a public pre-release build of Longhorn almost a year ago and hasv been quietly retuning the product while it focused on such things as Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) and Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 (SP1). With those products completed-Windows Server 2003 SP1 will be finalized within 10 days-the company is finally starting to take on Longhorn full-force. It must be time to take Scoble out of hibernation.

If Windows XP Gets WinFS, Does That Mean it will be Just as Good as Longhorn?

Back to Longhorn. So now the analysts are fretting over rumors that WinFS will be back ported to Windows XP, wondering whether this further dilutes Longhorn. That’s silly. What the analysts don’t get, in this case, is that the "three pillars of Longhorn" as announced at PDC 2003 a year and a half ago, which also include Avalon and Indigo (and, tangentially, WinFX), describe just the developer-oriented foundation to Microsoft’s next-generation OS. These are not features that end users will deal with directly. Moving them to Windows XP and/or Windows Server 2003 simply means that developers will be more apt to adopt those technologies quickly, because the potential market size will be so much bigger than it would be if they were Longhorn-only technologies. For end users, the unique new features in Longhorn-including Fast Search, the Aero user interface, more pervasive end-to-end digital media solutions, and so on-will never be back-ported to XP. And these features, and many others like them, will not only differentiate Longhorn but make it a viable, exciting, and desirable major upgrade for all Windows users. To find out more about some of the features Microsoft is planning for Longhorn, be sure to check out my Road to Windows Longhorn 2005 showcase on the SuperSite for Windows. You don’t buy milk from the butcher: Don’t try to get accurate information about upcoming Microsoft product information from analysts either.

Read the rest here

I still say Longhorn Beta 1 ain’t coming until September 2005 at PDC.