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March 23, 2006

Shipping News

Back in 2001, Microsoft announced that Longhorn would ship in 2003. Combined that with yesterday's announcement of yet more slippage and the history goes something like this:

  • 2001 - Longhorn will ship in 2003 - greatest thing since sliced bread

  • 2003 - Longhorn will ship in 2005 - will look cooler that whatever Apple ship

  • 2005 - Longhorn Vista will ship in 2006 - cross my heart and hope to die

  • 2006 - Vista will not ship until 2007 - it is hard making operating systems

Of course, they did ship XP near the beginning of that time frame but this is still an awful long time for Microflop suckers consumers to wait. To be fair, it is hard to see how anyone could write a new OS from scratch and get it shipped - I mean it even took Apple a couple of years* to do it :-)

Compare the innovation for a moment (between 2001 and 2007):

  • Microflop:
    • 2001 - Released Windblows XP

    • 2007 - Windows Vista - maybe

  • Apple:
    • 2001 - Cheetah (10.0)

    • 2001 - Puma (10.1)

    • 2002 - Jaguar (10.2)

    • 2003 - Panther (10.3)

    • 2005 - Tiger (10.4)

    • 2007 - Leopard (10.5)

Now that MacOS X runs on Intel chips, maybe Microflop should throw in the towel and license MacOS X as a Windblows replacement. Then they could concentrate on making incompatible versions of Oriface instead :-)

[* OS X beta was 1999, shipped as MacOS X 10.0 on March 24 2001]

Posted by Ozguru at March 23, 2006 06:00 AM