Microsoft reveals latest on Longhorn release

Microsoft is shaking up its plans for the next version of Windows to get the software off the drawing board and into PCs by the end of 2006.

As expected, the company on Friday announced a new road map for Longhorn, its revision to Windows XP. The changes - removing some features and altering others - are designed to let the company have a test version of the software next year and a final release for desktops and notebooks by 2006. A server release is planned for 2007.

"In order to make this date [of 2006], we've had to simplify some things, to stagger it. One of the things we're staggering is the Windows storage work," Jim Allchin, Microsoft's vice president in charge of Windows development, said in an interview with silicon.com sister site CNET News.com. "We’ll still have rapid search covering the data just as we planned."

Microsoft's top executives had characterised Longhorn as a major overhaul of the operating system and stressed that its release would not be determined by trying to hit a specific ship date. However, as the project threatened to push out into 2007 or beyond, analysts argued that the software maker needed to scale the project back to something more manageable.

The software maker has not had a full release of its desktop operating system since Windows XP debuted in October 2001, although the company has shipped specialised versions of the operating system, such as the Tablet PC and Media Center editions. Microsoft has also been faced with a strain on its programming resources for Longhorn, with much of the Windows development team commandeered to complete the Service Pack 2 security update to Windows XP, which Microsoft finished earlier this month.

Longhorn was originally supposed to have three major changes: a new file system, WinFS; a new graphics and presentation engine known as Avalon; and Indigo, a web services and communication architecture.

Microsoft is making changes to all three pillars. WinFS will be available as a beta when the Longhorn release comes out as a client. Avalon and Indigo will be part of Longhorn, but also made available separately for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.

By making Avalon and Indigo work on older machines, Microsoft hopes more developers will want to write software that takes advantage of the new technologies. Had they been Longhorn-only features, the concern is that developers would have held off writing software until there was a critical mass of machines running that operating system.

"Getting 'Longhorn' to customers in 2006 will provide important advances in performance, security and reliability, and will help accelerate the creation of exciting new applications by developers across the industry," Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, said Friday.

The changes come, Microsoft executives say, following months of conversations with computer makers, developers and customers. Computer makers were said to be pushing Microsoft for a release that would not take until 2007 to deliver.

Doing that, Allchin said, meant taking WinFS out of Longhorn. The company now believes it can more fully implement the new storage concept and do so simultaneously for both servers and desktop computers, something that would not have been possible had WinFS been part of Longhorn.

The move clouds Gates' long-time vision for a unified storage system, something he has called a "holy grail". Such a system would allow people to easily group all kinds of documents by various categories, such as who created or edited them. Improved search, across multiple kinds of files, will still be a key feature of the revamped Longhorn, Microsoft said.