Longhorn is now officially renamed Little Steer.

For those of you without knowledge of animal husbandry, ranching, or veterinary medicine a steer is a bovine that has not reached sexual maturity and is castrated.

The emasculation of Microsoft's efforts is reason enough to suspect that Windows will never produce a robust line of operating systems.

Imagine, all those brilliant minds in Redmond and the best they can do is change the labeling on the box for another XP variant.

The information about the WinFx filesystem really makes sense to me.

Microsoft is starting to see traction with it's .NET concept -- a concept it just about abandoned almost a year ago, because management ( Ballmer ) couldn't see the forest for the trees. I have to say this for .NET. It's really, really good. In fact, it's the right way to go. That's why I study .Net and mono on Suse Linux ( http://www.go-mono.com ) intensely.

.NET has crept up on WinFX and Longhorne and stole it's thunder. We ( developers ) can *build* Longhorn, so the high price of Systems Developers building all this in, at a great risk to the scalability and stability of a good selling OS is just not worth it. In fact, it could be detrimental to sales and to developer relations.

Microsoft is right is slowing down core OS development. They have to stop riding roughshod over the 3rd party developer community and not move the goal posts every quarter in the game!

We have enough with 2003, XP. and .NET on Windows and Linux. Let's let these products gestate and grow with help from the 3rd party developers, the apps developers, and the web developers and IT developers. Microsoft has to start respecting us as part of the process.