Longhorn trail goes cold

Microsoft's much-delayed operating system seems to have slipped by another year

Microsoft has announced plans to release Longhorn, the next major update of Windows, from late 2006 - a year later than many experts had expected.

Speaking after a presentation at the Comdex IT exhibition in Las Vegas last week, Peter Meister, senior product manager of the Windows Server Business Group, said Microsoft expects to ship the client version of the operating system at the end of 2006, followed by the server version at the end of 2007.

In his keynote speech at Comdex, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said the precise dates for Longhorn were uncertain because of the complexity of the project, which involves a radical overhaul of the file system, programming model and user interface. "Longhorn is a very ambitious piece of work," Gates asserted.

Microsoft also gave more detail about its plans to counter spam and security threats through new products due early next year.

In other announcements at Comdex, Sun and AMD detailed a far-reaching alliance that will see the firms collaborating on Sun Fire servers due in early 2004, based on AMD's Opteron 32/64bit processor and designed to run Linux as well as Sun's Solaris version of Unix.

HP also made a bid to broaden its output capabilities by selling heavy-duty multifunction devices and by introducing managed printing services. The company also introduced Forms Automation System workflow software, based on "smart paper" technology that lets users operate a digital pen that can store pen strokes and upload them to a server for storage and output.