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Story: Longhorn: If they build it, will anyone come?
Posted by: Arthur B. (Friday 1 April 2005, 11:59 PM)
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.
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