This article is more than 1 year old

Longhorn to erase Cairo mis-step with 1995 ship date

Like Bobby returning to Dallas, or something

Speculation about the ship date of Windows Longhorn, Microsoft's next big 'make or break' (Surely just 'break' - Ed) operating system reached fever pitch today when, hours before Bill Gates' big speech at PDC, the New York Times' Steve Lohr confidently asserted that it is "not expected to be shipped until late 1995 or 1996."

Appropriately, elsewhere in the same piece IBM's VP i/c Linux-boosting Irving Wladawsky-Berger muses: "Microsoft today reminds me of I.B.M. in the years from 1988 to 1990." Whatever you two people were smoking in that interview, guys, we really think you should share it around.

If Longhorn does make it out of the door in time for the fall 1995 market then Microsoft stands a good chance of beating the PowerPC partnership to the punch, but the company may have trouble persuading its PC partners to switch to the new OS if it turns out it won't run acceptably on a 386SX machine with 16 megs of memory. By 1996, however, Apple may be close to shipping its ambitious new Copland operating system, which was announced early in 1994, and IBM and Motorola and IBM are expected to unveil their own mass-market CHRP-based PowerPC machines in that year, so Redmond can't afford much slippage. ®

Update

Shame on those of you who've already emailed saying there's a typo in that last paragraph. You'd think the Cairo in the headline was some kind of clue, but apparently not.

Warning: Joke Alert

OK?

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like