Gates Says Pencil in Longhorn for 2006, But Don't Use Pen

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

If cranking out lines of code that work properly were only as predictable as the physics of making transistors smaller on a chip, we would have better software delivered at predictable intervals. But software is a slippery animal and it is tough to tame, unlike Moore's Law. Perhaps no company knows this better than Microsoft, the world's largest software company and the one whose schedules seem to slip the most.

That seeming probably has more to do with the high-profile nature of Microsoft's programs and the fact that all it does is make and sell software. At the Gartner IT Symposium last week, Microsoft's chairman and chief software architect, Bill Gates, explained that the difference between research and development is that the latter operated on a time line. Michael Fleisher, Gartner's chairman and CEO, asked Gates if the future "Longhorn" kicker to the Windows XP/2003 products was research, since it is expected to come to market about a year later than initially expected, and Gates countered that Longhorn was indeed development, not research--meaning would could expect the product at some point to actually appear.

But then he started hedging, because no one at Microsoft wants to be held down to a date, especially since Windows 2000 was late, Windows 2003 was late, and Visual Studio 2005 ("Whidbey") and SQL Server 2005 ("Yukon") just got pushed out into the second half of 2005. Even when Microsoft tags a numeric year onto the name of a product, that doesn't necessarily mean much, but it is a strong indicator that something will ship very close to within that year.

In any event, Gates explained why he was dancing on the date. "Now, there is a difference," he said. " 'Longhorn" is not a date-driven release. We have things where we say the train is leaving on this date; whoever has their act totally together by that date, the train will leave. And the train could have a lot of people on it or it could be fairly empty." Personally, I never thought of software development quite like this. Gates went on to qualify further. "There's a lot of things that have to do with IT complexity that these fundamental breakthroughs that are must have for "Longhorn. And so, as long as you have must-haves, until you're getting really close to completion, your date will be somewhat variable. And if you want customer and developer feedback that you're really willing to listen to, your date has to be somewhat variable."

Gates went on to say that there will be a Longhorn alpha release by the end of this year that customers and partners can look and provide feedback for, and then, and only then, will Microsoft set an official date. Fleisher tried to pin him down on a more precise date, and Gates conceded that he knew there was a lot of speculation about the delivery of Longhorn in 2006. In the interim, on the desktop, the Windows XP "Reloaded" edition, also known as Windows XP SP2, will come out later this year (maybe) that is all about improving the security of Windows XP. On the server front, Longhorn Server still seems to be in the cards, even though in late 2002, when Longhorn was shoehorned into the Windows roadmap when Microsoft started getting edgy about security and all of its .NET promises and pushed the "Blackcomb" kicker to Windows 2003 way out into the future beyond its original 2006 to 2007 launch date.