[Gllug] Longhorn

[Mike Brodbelt]

On Wed, 2003-11-05 at 12:55, Richard Jones wrote:

> Of course hoary old veterans like us have seen all this before. Back
> in '93/94 MS was hyping up an next gen operating system with an object
> oriented file store replacing the hierarchical filesystem (hmm, sounds
> familiar?). It was called Cairo.  What finally appeared, years behind
> schedule, was Windows 95, which was less than spectacular, technically
> speaking.

As I recall MS claimed to have two projects ongoing - one was called
Chicago, and eventually became Windows 95, the other was Cairo, which
was to be the successor to NT. AFAICT, Cairo was total vapourware, it
never appeared at all. Hyp about it just gradually quietened down and
went away, and MS played around for another 5 years before introducing
Win 2000.

> Of course by that point all the competitors had given up ever having
> any hope of competing with the wonderful Cairo and had largely driven
> themselves out of business.

Yes. Fortunately, I can't see the shadow of Longhorn slowing development
of Linux. I think MS's strategy is to make noise to stop potential
defectors. The NGSCB/TCPA lock in only works if you can get everyone on
board. If enough corporates are no longer running MS by the time
Longhorn arrives, the need to interoperate will prevent MS using
corporates from turning these features on. Look at the new Exchange - if
you want to use the magic disappearing email features, you have to have
a DRM server, and connector licenses for every email recipient. If you
want to have exteranal emails that magically disappear, you have to open
a hole in your firewall for the Internet to talk to your DRM server (can
you say hacker target) and pay MS a load more cash. Oh, and only people
who use Outlook can receive your mail.

Mike.


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