Programming Windows: More Alpha Tales (Premium)

The Longhorn leaks and rumors continued into 2003. But the longer the schedule was pushed out, the more excited enthusiasts became. Longhorn, suddenly, wasn’t just a minor stopover between Whistler (Windows XP) and Blackcomb. It was everything.

The Wall Street Journal got things started in 2003, fittingly enough, the week of the New Year, speculating whether Longhorn would “take the blue ribbon or get slaughtered.” The rationale for this question was solid enough: with an ever-creeping feature set and non-stop delays, Longhorn was starting to look a lot like a previous and failed Microsoft project called Cairo.

Cairo, described by Bill Gates as both “a paradigm shift” and “a holy grail,” had “imploded under its own weight,” according to one analyst in an eerie prognostication of what would later happen to Longhorn too. Not helping matters, Microsoft’s Longhorn efforts were led by the same man, Jim Allchin, who had previously spearheaded Cairo. And while even Allchin admitted to the parallels, he told the publication that Microsoft “didn't have the technology we needed to pull off [Cairo], but now we think we do. We maybe have a little more wisdom.”

“Longhorn is a delicate balancing act,” the Wall Street Journal report explained to its readers. “If Microsoft makes only minor changes to the operating system, few people will buy it. But if it makes big improvements, it will have to take more and more time to tinker with increasingly complex Windows code, raising the possibility of errors and delays, and some customers still might not bite.”

At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) the following week, Bill Gates delivered another keynote address, but he only mentioned Longhorn once, and in passing. Instead, he focused this time on coming Microsoft consumer platforms like Media2Go---which would later be rebranded as Portable Media Center (PMC)---and Smart Personal Object Technology (SPOT), a Windows CE .NET-based system for “everyday devices” such as alarm clocks, wristwatches, key chains, and even refrigerator magnets. A SPOT watch would later appear briefly, backed by an online service called MSN Direct, but that would be the end of that.

In February, Bill Gates and his executive staff was suddenly ready to talk Longhorn, and he admitted to The Seattle Times that Longhorn was indeed a big release, and not a minor stopover.

“It's a phenomenal step forward and very ambitious," he said. It's "my big-time focus now."

"There is a lot more in Longhorn that should be exciting to software developers,” CEO Steve Ballmer added, comparing the coming release to Windows XP, which didn’t offer much new to developers.

"Longhorn will be the first release we've done since Windows 95 for the client where we're able to do basically three things: (create) end-user excitement, developer excitement and new excitement for the hardware vendors," Longhorn development lead Chris Jones told the publication...