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• October 29, 2003 •
This week, Microsoft offered developers an early look at the next version of Windows (currently code-named Longhorn) at the company's Professional Developers Conference (PDC).
In his keynote speech, Microsoft's Chairman and Chief Software Architect, Bill Gates said that Longhorn would be the biggest release of this decade, the biggest since Windows 95.
According to Gates, Longhorn will take advantage of hardware improvements over the next three years, and that the software is today's limiting factor, not hardware.
"So the personal computer in less than three years will be a pretty phenomenal device. The graphics capability, some of which we have in today's machines and not exploited by all applications, will be even better. The memory, the speed, none of these things are the constraint. In fact, I think it's simple to say where the constraint is in this era. It's not the microprocessor, like it was when we needed performance for GUI; it's not the cost of networking, like we had to worry about when the Internet came along. Here, it's software, software that is managing itself, software that's reducing the complexity and that's really today's theme, getting the platform to be rich enough so that this all comes together."
Microsoft handed out CD's of a technical preview of Longhorn to developers, and "reviews" and pictures are popping up all over the Internet, although the final product won't look much like the current preview. If you'd like to see some pics, head over to Paul Thurrott's Longhorn Gallery. Since I didn't attend PDC 2003 myself, I'll have to wait another 4-8 weeks before I will receive my CD with the Longhorn preview build.
Other improvements include big advances in speech capabilities built into Longhorn, in both recognition and synthesis, and a new search system that should make finding things on your computer easier.
The first beta version of Longhorn is expected well into 2004. Right now the talk is for a summer '04 beta release, and Microsoft hasn't given any indication on a final release date, but my guess is that it could easily be at least three years out.
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