Wednesday, Jul 9, 2008
Who knows what Microsoft's whiz-bang new Windows will look like by the time it's ready, in 2006 or beyond? In the meantime, the bloggers of Redmond will provide progress reports.
Dec 22, 2003 | Ten years ago, Microsoft was in the midst of a monumental software development effort for a next-generation operating system -- two next-generation operating systems, actually.
There was "Chicago," which eventually went to market under the label of Windows 95, carrying the entire known universe of Windows users into the faster-and-better world of 32-bit computing -- a remarkably successful transition that still shapes the PC universe we work in today. Then there was Cairo, which was to follow on Chicago's heels, and offer realms of untold wonders in advancing the versatility and ease-of-use of mainstream desktop computing. Cairo never saw the light of day -- not as it was promised, anyway. A little phenomenon called the Internet distracted Microsoft and the rest of the world. Bill Gates turned his corporate battleship around to deal with it, and Cairo was buried as one more piece of Microsoft vaporware.
A decade later, during the technology industry's dark winter of discontent following the Internet bubble-burst, Gates has revived many of Cairo's ideas and unleashed his legions of software developers to go forth and, once more, seek the perennial Microsoft grail: a Better Operating System. This time, there's good reason to believe that the new product, nicknamed Longhorn, is not some phantom of FUD or a development dead-end.
In the Microsoft universe, separating truth from marketing blather and corporate-strategy feints is never easy. Revisiting the decade-old P.R. for Cairo today is a reminder of just how far big technology companies are willing to go in overpromising and under- (or not-at-all-) delivering. Still, Longhorn actually seems to be a real project with real plans and working prototypes. It may take forever to ship -- once slated for 2003, it is now looking more like a 2006 baby -- but it seems that Microsoft actually intends to sell it, or something like it, someday.
I'm more confident than I might otherwise be in saying so because of a new wrinkle in Microsoft's rollout plan for Longhorn: The company has OK'd, even encouraged, many of the developers working on the project to post their thoughts in public blogs. And it has added one well-known blogger, a Silicon Valley writer and programmer named Robert Scoble, to its payroll, to serve as a bridge between Microsoft's teeming horde of software developers (the company says it has 12,000 people working on Longhorn) and the cantankerous culture of bloggerdom.
This effort has already reaped tangible results for Redmond, and not only in generating a flood of Longhorn-related information on the Net. It has succeeded, in a way that no millions spent on Waggener-Edstrom P.R. and trade-press shmooze-fests could, in transcending the Evil Empire stereotypes that inevitably cling to Microsoft -- and highlighting the human faces behind the intimidatingly omnipresent Windows logo. It's hard to continue thinking of Microsoft as a monolithic Borg when you can follow the day-by-day jottings and musings of individual developers and Windows architects like Chris Anderson, Don Box, Chris Sells and many others.
In Scoble's words, "It's how Microsoft is trying to be a more mature platform leader. Instead of doing this work behind secret closed doors, we're giving everyone a good chance to work with us to make a better experience for customers." Even if you're cynical about the motivation behind such openness -- certainly, Microsoft understands just how effectively this version of "transparency" serves its corporate goals -- you can still respect the result: more, better, earlier information about the company's next big product, and a healthy back-and-forth between the product's creators and eventual users.
Get Salon in your mailbox!