Steve's Seaside Life

Daily Archive: August 29, 2004

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Richard gives his view on the Longorn roadmap changes

Richard draws simillar conclusions to me

Myself I am ecstatic that Avalon and Indigo are going to be available to both Windows XP and Longhorn clients. Why? Because this might signify the resurgence of the thick client applications and also make the deployment of those applications simpler with the subsequent release of one click deployment. No longer will I be shackled to the confines of a web browser but rather I will be freed to create a rich user experience like the “good old days” and thereby increase the number of available features to each application I create. The fact that Avalon is going to be released to a wider audience means applications that were once awkward to deploy over the web will now be easy. Forget the marketing hype this is a great leap forward for the smart client developers

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New roadmap for Longhorn

I was really disappointed when I heard that Microsoft were dropping WinFS from the initial release of Longhorn.  Then I read a bit more and listened to Jim Allchin, (the Group Vice President for Platforms at Microsoft), talk about the logic and sort of started to get excited.

 

Exited! That may seem a bit strange, until you realise that this indicates that Microsoft is actually starting to think responsibly about the needs to real businesses.  

 

“We’ve heard loud and clear from customers that they want improved productivity, easier deployment, increased reliability and enhanced security, as well as the many innovations we’ve been working on. We’ve had to make some trade-offs to deliver the features corporate customers, consumers and OEMs are asking for in a reasonable time frame,” said Jim Allchin, group vice president of the Platforms Group at Microsoft. “Our long-term vision for the Windows platform remains the same.”

Let’s take a look at what was really announced:

 

  1. Microsoft are going to ship Longhorn in 2006.  This gives corporates, developers and ISV’s something to plan around

  2. Microsoft are going to ship Indigo, (web services infrastructure), and Avalon, (Under experience), on XP and Windows …