Developers are getting, in some sense, their first look at Longhorn today. How long of a ramp-up process will be necessary before IT developers are comfortable with it and begin to integrate it into their daily work -- and more importantly, plan on Longhorn as part of future projects?
By knowing what Longhorn will look like, it will influence quite a bit of what people are doing today. For instance, the trend toward XML (Extensible Markup Language) Web services, as people use Indigo, built into the platform.
That will reinforce the move toward Web services as people see all of the schematising, the common information types for contacts, appointments, documents, annotation.
They will actually see that, OK, they can adopt those schema standards for the types they are using. I think it's extremely positive for XML Web services. It's the commercial ISVs (independent software vendors), I would expect, who will start to allocate resources to do unique Longhorn exploitive applications.
We're announcing here that our Office group will do a version of Office that requires Longhorn and that we are putting most of the Office resources into that effort. So that's a pretty direct thing by the most popular application that runs on Windows -- the one that really shaped the way people thought about Windows user interfaces and Windows data exchange -- that kind of thing.
What about legacy application support? Is there a straightforward path for moving older applications into the Longhorn era?
We demonstrated VisiCalc running on Longhorn today, to show that 20 years of compatibility is a serious thing -- people who want to run Electric Pencil and dBase and early versions of 1-2-3 if they want. We have built a compatible operating system. That's one of the things that Microsoft does. We have put a lot of resources into it. Even if we are providing new capabilities, we run those existing applications and make sure there are benefits with those applications. The greatest benefit comes with a new application written for Longhorn.
But the way that we let you search for information, replicate information between devices -- those things are benefits, some of which you get even of you use existing applications. So we are going to show for a little bit of effort what you can do in Longhorn, and then if you are willing to do a lot of effort, what the additional things are. The whole dialogue is just kicking off here.
