Microsoft has been fuzzy on the expected ship date for
the next major version of the Windows operating system, codenamed
Longhorn. And of late, the company been raising the possibility of
newly packaged editions of existing client and server
products.
Bob Muglia, senior vice president of Microsoft's Windows Server
division, confirmed that the server version of Longhorn will be
released no earlier than 2006, and if a second release of Windows
Server 2003 emerges, it will contain none of the "core" features of
Longhorn.
Is there really going to be a Release 2 of Windows
Server 2003?
There's a ton of innovation that we'd been building coincident
with the release of (Windows Server) 2003, some of which has
already shipped. We've shipped things like Windows SharePoint
Services since (Windows Server) 2003 has gotten out.
And some things haven't shipped, like, for example, the Whidbey
- Visual Studio 2005, I guess, is what I should call it now - the
Common Language Runtime, those sorts of pieces of technology we
know are coming in the next 12 months or so.
So we know there's a set of innovations that have been under
development. We want to get those into customers' hands. Exactly
the vehicle we're going to do that, we're still working on the
specifics of that. We don't know all the details yet.
Do you think of Release 2 for Windows Server 2003 as an
interim release before Longhorn?
I don't know how we'll package it.
When is Longhorn going to come out?
2006 is the earliest time frame we're looking at for Longhorn.
The thing to realise about it though ... there's a lot of features
coming in Longhorn. We want to make sure that those all fit
together in a cohesive way and solve customer issues. We spent a
ton of time over this last year or so on how we can make our
existing systems more secure and robust. So all that benefit is
going to transition into Longhorn as well. Teams are working pretty
hard on all of those pieces.
Is it likely the client and server will ship at
different times?
They will almost always ship at different times in the future.
Clients need slightly less bake time than servers do. When we look
at shipping a piece of software, we look at the process we go
through for shipping it.
At the tail end of the process, we go through these long
customer and internal deployment tests, which are measured in
eight-week sorts of segments. So you deploy a version of the server
out there, you leave it in production for eight weeks, you get all
kinds of statistics about failures and things during that period,
and then you start it again.
The clients don't have that same attribute. So there will almost
always in circumstances be some distance between the times. Exactly
how long, we still have to figure out.
Was the 2006 time frame applicable to both the Longhorn
client and server?
I can't speak as much for the client pieces. I know the server
piece.
Some analysts talk about Longhorn server in 2007. Is
2007 likely?
It's still too early to say for sure. I know we're tracking
towards building this thing, and we're working very closely with
the client group and the core group to drive it. We'll look at our
tail-end schedules as we get closer, because to me, it will always
be about the deployment side of it, making sure that the thing is
solid and robust.
Is it possible that any Longhorn features will turn up
in a second release of Windows Server 2003?
There are really three major pillars for Longhorn. One is the
new user interface pieces in the Avalon UI, the graphical UI.
Another is WinFS. And then the third is the web services
infrastructure in Indigo. Those are three pretty big pieces, and I
don't think you'll see any one of those three pieces.
At this point, it doesn't look like any of those things could
possibly ship any earlier. Those are all about the platform
transformation. That's really the core of Longhorn.
When I look at Windows Server, one of the things I do is look at
what I call workloads that people use Windows Server for. So, for
example, there's a file-and-print workload. There is an application
server workload. There's a terminal server workload. There's a
networking infrastructure workload. These are all different ways
that people use Windows Server in their environment. Windows Server
is used for many things, and these workloads describe it.
So what we're doing now, based on the (Windows Server) 2003
technology, is we have innovation going on in each and every one of
those workloads. And some of that innovation may be ready for us to
ship before Longhorn, and we'll try and get it out in whatever
vehicle we can get it out.
Other pieces won't be ready, and they'll wind up in Longhorn. So
in that sense, you could say, well, some pieces of technology will
either ship in Longhorn or they might ship earlier. But the key
innovations that you think about Longhorn, no, those won't ship
earlier.
Carol Sliwa writes for
Computerworld