Bill Gates on Tiger and Longhorn
April 30, 2005 by Mike Wendland
Bill Gates came to town Friday and I had a one-on-one interview with him. We talked about a lot of things, especially Microsoft’s initiatives with the automotive industry. After all, I do work in Detroit.
But his visit was on the day that Apple released its new Tiger operating system. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to note the positive reviews about Tiger appearing pretty much everywhere and ask him about Microsoft’s latest upgrade - code-named Longhorn - which won’t be out until late 2006.
Gates seemed nonplussed.
“I think its great that people are seeing that operating systems can be better,” he said. “We like the world to be excited about operating systems.”
But he clearly saw a challenge for Longhorn.
“Our main challenge with Windows is getting people to see this new version were doing as being so much better than the previous version that they’re willing to upgrade,” he conceded. “And so as they’re reading about neat things in Tiger we’re hoping they?ll realize a high percentage of those things and some other things are in Longhorn and hopefully upgrade as Longhorn comes along.”
What’s the delay? So that they can field test with 5% of the cpu market and then copy it out right in the old MS traditional way of marketing. Hope that the viruses and bugs are a longwait after the long awaited OS upgrade!
Even Microsoft seem to be comparing Tiger features to Longhorn features. Nobody seems to realise that on the current Apple release schedule, the NEXT Apple OS will be out at around the same time as Longhorn.