Is Microsoft's Longhorn a bum steer?

MICROSOFT'S LONGHORN will probably rely on its Palladium technology if that ever gets past the Vole watchers, but we've an idea that the cunning plan might go quite a bit further than that.

What about - for example - if Microsoft, fresh from its bruising battle with the Lindows OS, which it lost, decides to drop the "Windows" name altogether?

That name is certainly due for an overhaul - we remember the first iteration of the pesky thing back in the mid 80s, when it appeared for a while that the GEM graphical user interface might out-MS MS.

Although we continue to be told that Longhorn won't have backwards compatibility with previous versions of Windows, of course this cannot apply to everything that's thrown into the Longhorn pudding.

It's got to support that stuff like TCP/IP and the like - but we're really talking here about a grievous lack of backware hardware compatibility.

When we first heard this from a reliable source from a hardware vendor close to both Intel and Microsoft's plans, we could hardly believe our ears.

There's still a dearth of drivers for Windows Eyecandy, and quite a few hardware vendors have just decided to give up the ghost and not bother to write new ones.

If the combo of Longhorn and PCI Express (3GIO) is really so compelling, as the hardware vendor seemed to suggest, the old trick of changing the OS would be likely to antagonise many more users than it would attract.

Not all of them, of course. After the Longhorn article we wrote a week or so back, we had some e-massages from high performance freaks who said they'd switch like a shot if the new platform was compelling enough.

But the rest of us, and by that we include every large corporation, have surely been bitten too many times to fall for this one again?

We wonder if the Prescott New Instructions (PNI) that we wrote about some weeks back have anything to do with this cunning Wintel plan which will be almost ready to roll Autumn next year.

Intel, for quite some years now, has been pushing the "get rid of legacy" hardware line, and Microsoft is well into doing the same thing too. As we revealed earlier this year, not very long from now we're going to see platforms which can't include floppies, while the good old parallel and serial ports are bound for the scrapheap of history too.

We're told by an Asian contact that major third party vendors, including Nvidia and ATI, are already pretty far advanced with plans they have to slot into Longhorn and PCI Express. NV40, here we come... µ