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 THE STAT 26Percentage of wireless customers who use their cell phones to take picturesMore Vitals
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JUNE 1, 2004
Something "Fundamentally Different" Heads Your Way BW's technology columnist, Stephen Wildstrom, discusses the impact of Microsoft's upcoming software release, plus other IT trends Following are highlights from a presentation by BusinessWeek Technology & You columnist Stephen H. Wildstrom and his answers to audience questions afterward at the CeBIT technology conference in New York City on May 27: Stephen H. Wildstrom: I was originally billed here as taking the long view, which would have given me the opportunity to talk about DNA computers and quantum computing. And it would have been really easy because I could have said anything and nobody, including me, would have had any idea whether I was right or wrong for a very long time. But instead I thought it would be a lot more useful to focus on a much nearer term future. So I'm going to be talking about things that are happening, or that I expect to happen, in a time frame starting the third quarter of this year and maybe ending around 2010. And the first thing that's going to happen that will have a real impact on IT managers is going to happen very soon. And that is Microsoft's release of Service Pack 2 for Windows XP. Service Pack 2 is fundamentally different from anything Microsoft has ever done. Like any service pack, it contains a roll-up of all the bug fixes and security patches that Microsoft has released since Service Pack 1, which was about a year ago. But the big thing about SP2 is that to a considerable extent, it replaces the existing security model of Windows XP. It changes a great number of installation defaults to a much more secure configuration, which isn't hard considering that the default configuration of XP is essentially hopeless. And it changes a number of security internals to get what Microsoft promises will be a much more secure computing environment than we have ever had with a Microsoft desktop operating system. Within the enterprise, deploying it won't be too bad because it's managed. Use SMS or whatever and you can deploy what you want and set your defaults according to policy. Where it's really going to be an issue is when people start deploying it on their own machines that are occasionally connected to your networks. For one thing, it's going to break applications. They're trying to keep that to a minimum but applications that operate at a very low level, especially those that integrate with the security system -- leading candidates being anti-virus software and virtual private networks -- are likely to break. The second thing is it's going to cause sort of an interesting support problem because it turns on a new firewall, which is a much better than the old Internet Connection Firewall. Your users will find that when they run an app the first time, it's going to ask for permission to allow the app to connect to the network. This is going to confuse them. And it's going to create a lot of burden on help desks. So it's one you're going to have to prepare for. The much more interesting challenge is Longhorn, which I imagine everybody knows is Microsoft's code name for the next version of Windows, which is due whenever. It's hard to be very definitive about Longhorn because it seems to be morphing every day. It's clearly a project that is in some difficulty. So it is not clear when it's going to ship, and it's not clear what it's going to be. Based on what Microsoft has been saying about it, it will be at least as important a change for client machines as was the move from Windows 98 to Windows 2000. But the most important thing in it is it is for the first time really in the history of Windows, it is a total change in the file system. NTFS, the basic Windows file system, remains there at the bottom. But on top of it the file system of Longhorn will be a true relational database. You will have a database database with a bunch of fields. The actual contents of the file will be one of those fields, a large binary object field. The rest of the fields, which will vary with the type of the file, will be metadata.So for the first time we're going to have a file system, which actually knows something about the files. This is conceptually a huge difference from a file system which knew where files were located, maybe when they were accessed and who accessed them but essentially knew nothing about their contents. It's a big change and they are clearly having some trouble pulling it off. They've already pulled back on some of their more ambitious plans to integrate WinFS with the .Net frameworkin a way that would basically make your desktop and the network completely indistinguishable. They can't pull that off in the time frame of the client release. They still hope to do it eventually. The plan had been to release the first Longhorn beta at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference this fall. That has now slipped to the first half of next year. They're still talking about a release to manufacturing in the first half of 2006. Frankly, I think that's very unlikely because history tells us that for an operating system release of this magnitude, the beta period is a minimum of 18 months not a little under a year. So I think at the very best they might be able to ship something by the end of 2006. The caveat on that is that if they slide their ambitions back enough, they can ship it earlier. But they'll be shipping a lot less. The server version, the replacement for Window Server 2003, won't ship before 2007. And you won't really be able to get the full benefit of Longhorn until the server version is out. And the really full .Net version of the WinFS file system will probably not be there until the end of the decade.
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