Microsoft and Gates place bet on Longhorn, top-secret new Windows
Microsoft is working on a top-secret new version of Windows codenamed Longhorn with Gates himeself spending a significant amount of his time on it. But Longhorn has many similarities to Cairo, according to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required), which never made it out.
Cairo was once touted by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates as a radical "paradigm shift" in computing, mainly for its lofty goal of overhauling and unifying Windows' file systems. For everyday computer users, the benefits could include being able to seamlessly search through e-mail messages, Microsoft Word files or even Internet pages in the same way, instead of using one of the many separate file systems that exist today.
..."If they change the file system, they are going to break programs," says Michael Cherry, a former Microsoft program manager who is now an analyst for the firm Directions on Microsoft in Kirkland, Wash. Resistance from the Office group helped sink previous Microsoft efforts to unify file systems, and Microsoft should expect "a lot of resistance from Office" again, says former Microsoft executive Usama Fayyad, now president and chief executive of data-mining company digiMine Inc. He thinks a new file system is "a nice vision, [but] it's not a reality, and it won't be a reality in the short term."