Infoworld on Longhorn

[Chris Nahr]

Jon Udell on Infoworld provides a nice three-page summary about Indigo, WinFS & Avalon.

Udell likes Indigo. He also likes WinFS although it sounds like a plan for the world's slowest file system to me. Avalon is certainly nice but totally proprietary and chained to the Longhorn OS.

Longhorn would make perfect sense in an alternate universe where the Web never happened, where phones stayed dumb, and where Windows applications owned the edge of the network. But in this universe nothing owns the edge. We have browsers, we have computerized phones, and we have a growing number of portable, rich-client technologies. Although Microsoft would like us to regard Longhorn as a unified whole that's greater than the sum of its parts, its pillars will intersect with enterprise IT in quite different ways.

The big question is, which 3rd party applications will be foolhardy enough to target WinFS and Avalon, thus losing backwards compatibility with XP?

[Derek Meister]

Hell, half the applications out there are still being created with a Win9x mindset. They just happen to run well enough on XP that people consider them fully compatible, despite a good number of them requiring admin access to run thanks to not keeping up with the changes Microsoft requires programs to adhear to in keeping read/write access to certain directories (Program Files vs My Documents, etc) in a way different than 9x.

[Rob_Merritt]

My big beef is that major freakin programs like Autocadd still require admin rights to run properly.