Lifting the lid on Longhorn
Published: 10 Nov 2003 11:20 GMT
"Microsoft wants to turn more browser applications into Windows applications by offering richer functions," Silver said. Those richer functions include WinFS, new graphics presentation software code-named Avalon, and new communications technology code-named Indigo.
While Microsoft practically owns the market for Web browser software, with a greater than 90 percent market share, it does not exert that same control over Web standards. The explosive popularity of the Web browser even led many experts to predict that fat-client OSes such as Windows would give way to thin-client browser software that left much of the heavy-duty computing power to corporate servers that are connected to PCs.
A wholesale shift to server-based computing never took place, but the continued popularity of rival technologies such as Linux and Java has given companies more options for developing desktop software that doesn't rely on Windows.
Complicating matters further for Microsoft is the challenge it faces in persuading customers to sign up for new licensing agreements when their current contracts expire in a few years. The company hopes that, taken together, the new Longhorn functions will encourage developers to write applications that will work with Windows, not Java or other competing technologies.
Longhorn could also help buoy .Net. Along with IBM, the company has been a key driver behind standards for Web services that promise to increase efficiency by breaking down barriers among companies that use disparate systems. To date, Microsoft's .Net Web services technology has not been the overwhelming success the company had expected.
Already, as Microsoft chairman Bill Gates told CNET News.com, the company's consumer-oriented initiative, .Net My Services, has been largely reborn as part of Longhorn. The plan, designed to tie individuals and consumers more tightly to Windows through a series of paid services, had been largely abandoned earlier because of partner resistance and concerns over privacy.
The new plan
In a keynote speech that opened last week's company-sponsored developer conference, Gates said Longhorn will make it easy to create applications that require more sophisticated graphics rendering, greater processing power and huge hard drives in future PCs. Windows is being overhauled to process data in the Extensible Markup Language (XML) and to use HTML to publish information, he said.
"The personal computer in less than three years will be a pretty phenomenal device," Gates said. "Exploiting the client, delivering data in the form of XML to the client and then having local rich rendering while still being able to have mapping to HTML for reach -- that's something we're making very simple."
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