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July 18, 2005

What's in a name?

Scoble wants people to “…call Longhorn all the bad names you can. Let’s get it out of our systems.”

Oh, yeah, and link back to his post so he can follow the link-tracking on Technorati, Bloglines, and the supah-seekrit blog-tracking thing he’s privvy too. Always nice to kill two birds with one stone.

Longtime was the name used in Wired’s fictitious article about Linus Torvalds being hired by Microsoft, and it’s still the name I use when speaking of it. And that includes when I’m speaking to my “featured in a MS Windows Server 2003 advertisement” CIO.

We could call it Copland. Or Rhapsody. Because I think that’s the more apt comparison. Microsoft is obviously struggling both to get Longhorn out the door (witness the long delays and last year’s Longhorn Reset) and to make it relevant (witness the Gnomedex ballyhoo about RSS in Longhorn and IE7) Even with the betas looming, there seems to be confusion about what Longhorn is going to be.

God help us when we find out what changes the server product will force upon us.

What’s hurting Longhorn is the same thing that has hurt every spoken-of-in-advance Microsoft strategic technology in the last decade - Microsoft. Too many back-door promises have already been made (“Just wait until Longhorn!”), too many products were delayed for Longhorn technologies (there wasn’t going to be an IE7, remember?), and too many projects (MS and non) are trying to get some Longhorn Importance rubbed off onto them.

It’s still a year away. Long enough for them to demonstrate support for security updates via podcasting, and announce “.Net on Rails”…

Posted by jim at July 18, 2005 09:05 AM