Microsoft's Gates dampens Longhorn OS fever

THERE'S AN INTERVIEW with Bill Gates, Microsoft's Bossman, over at NE Asia online which appears to suggest the firm hasn't just put its server Longhorn OS on hold, but is unsure when the client version will be launched.

Microsoft has spent the last year hyping up Longhorn to its third party hardware companies but Gates said in the interview that "there's a lot of ambitious work in Longhorn" and "we don't even know exactly when we'll have that".

What he did say about Longhorn doesn't really bring us a lot forward, with Gates wobbling on about how the operating system doesn't know anything about people.

Well, you can say that again Bill. People get totally infuriated with your operating systems from time to time, and wonder how, for example, the Irish railways can run on a VMS system for 17 years without a re-boot, while sometimes 17 minutes is good for Windows OSes.

Gates just said that the OS will be integrated with XML and the network and moving the database into the OS, a scary thought this one.

XML - of course - is part of Microsoft's cunning Longhorn plans.

Meanwhile, he claimed that Microsoft played only one role and that was writing software. Perhaps he had better go explain this strategy to his consumer division which is selling wireless LANs, keyboards, mice and all sorts of other, err... hardware. µ