eWeek Senior Writer, Darryl Taft contacted me last week and asked about how I’d feel if Microsoft dropped Avalon from the Longhorn release, and then put some of my comments in this article. He mentioned that he had a quote from a Microsoft exec inferring that it may happen, but I didn’t realize that it was a quote from Soma Somasegar. My full comment was:
“In my opinion, it would be a total disaster. The high coming out of PDC ’03 was incredible, and they would lose a lot of respect with the developers out there. We all knew WinFS was a bit aggressive, so it didn’t surprise us that it was removed. But Avalon is a totally different thing. It was the most complete of the triads of Longhorn (at the time), so I don’t know why they would pull it. The IDE for the Avalon stuff is a whole different issue. Without an editor Avalon will not be good to any of the developers. Since I have not seen an IDE, only rumors, that is the one thing that concerns me.”
I understand that there needs to be a balance between feature, quality, and time to market, but if you remove the 2 major reasons to upgrade from WinXP to Longhorn (WinFS and Avalon) then you better replace them with something just as good. Otherwise no one will upgrade, especially if you are going to be able to get Avalon on WinXP. That is basically what happened (IMHO) with WinME. There was no valid reason to upgrade from Win98se (some will say that is was just Win98 3rd edition). In the WinME to WinXP migration there were very valid reasons to upgrade (a very stable, enterprise ready OS the home users could also use). Besides Avalon, I can’t find a reason to upgrade to the next OS. If there is one, Microsoft is sure doing a poor job getting the word out.