Longhorn at WinHEC - More setbacks and More Features Removed

Longhorn Summarized:

no advanced file system
no advanced communications
no advanced security/DRM framework

but instead, it will have:

IE7 with RSS
better graphics
better search

Exactly why am I supposed to get excited about Longhorn?

The writing is on the wall. At WinHEC, MS previewed Longhorn and there's more that's been removed but hey, they're still shooting for late '06 release. It makes me wonder what all those gee-whiz engineers are doing in Redmond that they can't get this product to ship. With the exception of Aero, all the fundamentally radical new features promised in Longhorn have been stripped. It only seems like yesterday (actually late '99) when Fortune wrote a long article with Bill Gates discussing how amazing Longhorn would be... but really, even Dvorak is calling it Windows XP SP3!

MS needs to do what Apple did with Mac OS X - scrap it all and start from scratch! As far as I'm concerned, when MS dumped city codenames for animals (um, didn't Apple do the same thing with OS X), they veered hard off the road.

Longhorn is Copland!