Windows 10 Will Never Have Its Longhorn Moment (Premium)

New Windows chief Panos Panay posted a video showing off the evolution of Windows 10 this week. It wasn’t very exciting. In fact, it showed almost nothing of the very subtle changes to come.

Despite this, I can see that some Windows enthusiasts got a bit caught up in the moment as they started picking apart individual frames of this horribly low-resolution video, looking for something---anything---to get excited about.

There is nothing.

Only two changes stand out, and they are to the Windows user interface what those recently-unveiled new icons are: No meaningful change in functionality at all. (In fact, the new icons make an appearance in the video, too.) There’s the subtly restyled Start menu that’s been hinted at and rumored for months, where live tiles become a lot less colorful but, curiously, not a lot less live. (Aren’t live tiles going away?) And then there is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it peek at what appears to be a UWP File Explorer app.

Which, oddly, does remind me of the early Longhorn prototype videos and demonstrations. Which we later found out were faked using Director and didn’t represent real code.

And that’s the thing. In 2003, Microsoft’s explosion of information about Longhorn at PDC was the closest a Microsoft event has ever come---before or since---to a rock concert. I should know: I was there. And I watched as eager developers literally pushed each other aside so that they could race to the front of the massive Los Angeles Convention Center keynote hall and get as close as possible to their improbable hero Bill Gates. Who would take the stage later that day. And lie to all of us.

Longhorn is hard. It’s hard because it was such an exciting moment. Was, in fact, quite literally the most exciting moment in the history of Windows. Which is what makes what happened to that project the most poignant and horrible thing that ever happened to Windows. Well, until Steven Sinofsky and Windows 8. Lesson learned: Things can always get worse.

But the collateral damage from Longhorn fell long and wide. Microsoft’s system for building Windows couldn’t scale to the size of the collective teams that Longhorn required. And a lot of its moonshot technologies---especially the SQL-based object-oriented file system---were revealed to be vaporware, never to appear in a shipping product. It is perhaps historically interesting that then-Windows chief Jim Allchin’s biggest accomplishment was also is least well-understood or respected: After the Longhorn failure, he shipped a major Windows version, Vista, with an unbelievable list of new features and functionality, in just 18 months.

Yes, Vista needed two service packs---Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Windows 7---to be truly appreciated, and that required more time. And yes, Mr. Allchin was as unceremoniously shown the door for his transgressions as was Sinofsky later. But that event capped the end to an incredible years-long run at history ...

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