Microsoft’s new OS, “Longhorn,” is already years late, and now they’re saying it’ll be out in the middle of 2006 and have seven different versions. Longhorn is MS’s answer to Mac OS X, which, by the time Longhorn arrives, will be 5 years old. I’d say that Apple had a bit of jump on them, wouldn’t you?
What’s interesting about all this is the public nature of the delay. Perhaps if Microsoft hadn’t been so quick off the mark to promote the heck out of vaporware, no one would have made a big deal of it. Case in point, amusingly enough… Apple.
Exhibit A, from my collection of useless discs:
Back in 1996, Apple promoted the new System 8; which was due to be a kind of “rewrite” of the original Mac system that had been around since 1984. They sent out these discs to show off the new technologies and whatnot. Everyone fixated on the “themes” support, which never came… although the fonts for those themes live on in the Mac OS today.
Time passed, and System 8 never arrived… at least, not as a new system. System 8 became the designation for just another incremental update. But the new system project continued on under the name “Rhapsody.” It was described this way: “Rhapsody will offer a stable, modern, fully preempted and memory-protected multitasking environment with built-in capabilities for symmetric multiprocessing. Customers who need these “industrial-strength” capabilities will be able to transition smoothly from Mac OS 8 to Rhapsody while leveraging their investments in Mac OS-compatible hardware and software, because Mac OS compatibility will be built into Rhapsody.”
The project went nowhere. A bunch of new companies were created, including “Taligent” and other joint ventures, none of which produced any real products.
Finally, the whole thing was dumped, as was the CEO of Apple. The return of Steve Jobs meant a new direction for the company and the OS.
Apple’s “Longhorn” has long since passed into the hazy mists of the past with the success of OS X. The lesson for Microsoft is simple: if you’ve spent that much effort on an OS that still isn’t ready, dump it and try something else.
