I am afraid Robert Scoble only added to the confusion and/or frustration with this post. In short, the question some people have now is - if all three pillars of Longhorn are not going to be in it, what's left?

Scoble: “Avalon and Indigo are much more important for developers now that they're on XP and Server 2003 too.” This is supposed to somehow justify cutting of all three pillars, but I don't see how.

The problem is that Avalon will NOT be the same on XP/2003 and Longhorn (at least that's how it was supposed to be, due to the fundamental compositing features of Longhorn that will not be present on XP/2003). As a desktop developer that does it for a living close to 10 years now, and using MS technologies only, I'm not sure what will XP/2003 version of Avalon bring to me. However, I had a good idea on what Avalon will bring to me with Longhorn, and I didn't mind that it was not going to be present on XP/2003. Historically, that's how things were - when was the last time that Microsoft back-ported features from a new OS into older ones? Never. If you want new stuff, you have to upgrade.

 

Thus, I think this is just a marketing spin on a terrible delay. Unless Indigo and Avalon (and WinFS) will have exactly (or close to) the same feature set on all OS-es. If they are not, how is Longhorn different from XP SP3 + Avalon + Indigo + WinFS? Why do we need a new OS if crucial new features are coming in the form of add-ons? Why wait another year and a half? If these pillars are not crucial, what is?

 

I understand from Scoble's post that Microsoft hasn't told us everything yet. That's fine, but I suggest they start talking. Even if it means bits and pieces of information left on Microsoft blogs.

 

The developers you are referring to, Robert, need to be informed on what's coming. Saying that we just need to “wait, there are good things to come” is not enough. Not after so many reschedules and feature cuts. I am sure that Microsoft has valid reasons for all this, but due to the long development cycles (especially when new platform is involved) we need to know more and we need to know now.

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