The company is also planning to bring back into the Longhorn client release some elements of its program to help businesses secure their network. The "Network Access Protection" feature, which helps businesses scan and update machines before they add them to a corporate network, has been moved around on Microsoft's roadmap several times. Most recently, the software maker took the feature out of this year's Microsoft Server 2003 "R2" release, leaving the impression it would not come into Windows until a server version of Longhorn in 2007.
However, Microsoft corporate vice-president Jawad Khaki said in a Web chat last week that some elements of NAP would come in next year's Longhorn version.
"It will ship with some out-of-box capabilities to enforce policy compliance," he said. "Additionally, we are working with 40-plus partners who are industry leaders in antivirus, intrusion detection/prevention, network access devices and much more to support the NAP architecture."
Security, more broadly, is likely to be a key point of emphasis for both Microsoft's developers and its marketing pitch. The security work Microsoft did for the Windows XP Service Pack 2 upgrade shifted a good chunk of the Windows team off of Longhorn, though its efforts there have no doubt continued into Longhorn.
One thing that has changed, said Yankee Group's DiDio, is that businesses are significantly happier with Windows security now than they were a year ago. In a soon-to-be-published Yankee Group survey, Microsoft was given an average rating of 7.6 out of 10, up from ratings of well below five a year ago.
"We haven't had any major viruses or worms, knock wood, in the last few months," she said.
It is unclear whether that newfound support for Microsoft will make it easier or harder for the company to sell Longhorn as a security enhancement. On the one hand, customers are liking what they're seeing from the software giant. At the same time, they may feel more secure with the operating system they have than they might have felt a year ago.
Talkback
How many people actually set out to buy XP in the first place? XP was installed by default on most new PCs, and people have bought a lot of PCs in the last 4 years.
I imagine Longhorn will be sold by exactly the same means, and Microsoft will claim it to be a resounding success.
In short. The idea of having your company go through some sort of total migration project once every three, four or five years to then cool things down for several years seems to be a thing of the past. Because now it looks like you'll either wait until all Microsoft phases are proven and keep what you have mostly until then. Or you jump through all the hoops each and every time Microsoft delivers the next phase while running most things in some sort of downwards compatibility mode in the mean time. Or you say bullocks to all that and start looking for lasting alternatives. In other words: there are though decisions to be made. Certainly at the company level.
If companies think that the above is worth a 7.6 on the security scale in favour of Microsoft then they either forget to have a detailed birds eye view over time or they're easily satisfied.
Given that, as usual, the promised benefits of migrating to Microsoft's latest and greatest (just not fully available just yet) are historicly proven never delivered at the very beginning but rather more or less at the end after huge investments have already been made. And it looks like significant time will pass between the first and final (complete) delivery of Longhorn. That way it could easily become a five, six year long total business commitment before the end results are in.
I haven't even upgraded to Svc pack 2 on xp.. why?
DRM and other "Shinanigans" MS is placing in
windows other than "upgrades". Longhorn is going
to be even worse on 3rd party developers etc. and
the era of free use on a PC is coming to an end because of MS. Buy Longhorn... NOT!!
Why use the DiDiot as a quote in any article? It is well known that the "Yankee Group" is a mouthpiece for Microsoft. You might as well say that "an MS PR company said..."
Yankee are about as independant of MS as the Inland Revenue are independant of the taxman!