Gilmor Gang - Longhorn Pillars
I was listening to IT Conversations again but this time it was the Gilmor Gang. One of the guests was Mary Jo Foley who discussed a story on Microsoft cutting back on what's going into the Longhorn release of Windows. The discussion reminded me a lot of the typical two party political process and the job of the politicians who aren't in power. The political party representatives that aren't in power basically criticize anything the party in power says - regardless of whether it's a good move or not. Because of this, you tend to discount anything the opposition party says. It just seems that criticizing and bringing into question Microsoft's moves is SOP (Standard Operational Procedure) and everything that Google does is the shining light for the future. It's probably a lot to do with a past behaviour being a good indication of future behavior, but we need to remember things can change.
For myself as developer, the announcement is great news. As mentioned in another post, technical information on Longhorn held little meaning for me since it was so far in the future. This was because of a combination of a tentative 2006 release date and the fact it was an all or nothing upgrade scenario. Since people would have to upgrade from Windows XP to get the functionality, it meant developers had to effectively add another 2 years to the actual release date to get an indication of when they would expect any significant demand for Longhorn development services. Now that both Indigo and Avalon functionality is planned to be made available on Windows XP, it means that developers can practically plan to start leveraging the functionality in a 2006 time frame.
The Gilmor Gang discussions appeared to discount Smart Clients as a technology option for the Internet. My opinion is that the Smart Client direction that a lot of the industry is working towards has huge potential. I'd love to see Google make available smart clients for their services e.g. a .NET smart client for GMail. The phrase "one runtime shall rule them all" (or variations of that intent) has been used ridicule both the Java and .NET VM efforts in the past. The software industry does benefit from having one runtime in the Internet age because everything is so global and interconnected. Currently that one run time is the HTML/jscript/NativePlugin based environment of a (predominantly IE) browser. The smart client murmurings from the software industry as a whole is a reaction to the weaknesses of such a html/jscript browser based environment.
Just a test of comments.
Posted by Anonymous | 24 February 2005 21:23