Microsoft Says Longhorn Server Is Coming

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

As part of its review of its financial results with Wall Street analysts last week, Microsoft's chief financial officer, John Connors, confirmed that the company would indeed launch a server version of its future "Longhorn" kicker to the current Windows 2003 Server operating system. Exactly what the Longhorn Server might be remains a mystery.

As we reported several weeks ago, Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman and chief software architect, confirmed that customers should pencil in the launch of the client version of Longhorn for early 2006, but he added that it was not a "date driven" release. Microsoft wants some slack, in case things have to slip for technical or marketing reasons. Remember that 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. While it is easy to criticize Microsoft because it is a software company and software projects almost always run late (as opposed to hardware or services), the fact is that, given the increased focus on security, interoperability, and integration, steering an updated Windows software stack to market is a tricky bit of piloting.

A lot of people expect that the Longhorn Server won't come out until after the Longhorn client, but it could turn out to be just the opposite. Think about it this way. One of the key new features of the Longhorn release is the new Windows File System (WinFS), a kicker to the current NTFS file system used in Windows NT, Windows 2000, and Windows 2003. WinFS is based on database technologies that exploit relational data storage and XML hooks. WinFS is also, not coincidentally, a key feature of SQL Server 2005, which stands to reason. WinFS is, in effect, a file system created from a stripped-down version of Yukon. Visual Studio 2005 is the development tool that can make use of WinFS on the server and within SQL Server 2005. So it makes sense to link up the launch of Longhorn Server, which could be called Windows Server 2005, with SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005. The "Windows XP Reloaded" interim release of Windows XP, expected sometime before the Longhorn client and probably late this year or early next, to boost the security of Windows XP, will give Microsoft more time to get WinFS and other Longhorn features ready for clients, which, quite honestly, do not need this technology nearly as badly as enterprise server customers, which are trying to store application data in many different formats, in many different file systems and databases.

Microsoft has not said word one about whether Longhorn Server will be synched up with SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005, and it will not do so until it suits its purposes and it has a reasonably good idea about whether any of this software can be delivered to market in the second half of 2005. What is probably slowing down the rollout of WinFS is performance. The issue that Microsoft is probably wrestling with is how to make WinFS perform as well as NTFS on similar workloads, since object relational databases and XML are fairly well understood at this point.

In late 2002, Microsoft executives confirmed there would be a server implementation of Longhorn, then they quickly killed the idea. Earlier this year, the rumor mill started mumbling that Longhorn Server might be back in the cards. Connors' comments last week are the first recent confirmation that Longhorn Server is coming. Longhorn, by the way, is itself an interim and unexpected release. It was jammed between the "Whistler" Windows XP/2003 version of Windows a few years ago when Microsoft took a hard look at all the promises it was starting to make about the "Blackcomb" kicker to Windows 2003. Longhorn pushed Blackcomb far beyond its original 2006 to 2007 launch date, and is not expected until 2007 and 2008.