When Microsoft chairman Bill Gates touts his company's next Windows operating system, code-named Longhorn, he can barely contain his enthusiasm, adding "it will be super to get that out in the hands of our customers." The big question is whether customers will share Gates' enthusiasm more than a year from now.
Speaking at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference in Seattle on April 25, Gates gave a preview of Longhorn, to be released in late 2006. The preview, demonstrated in a keynote speech by Gates and other executives, showed off security enhancements, a computer "flight data recorder" that can diagnose the reasons for crashes, "rich indexing" that will allow easy searches and previews of the contents of a hard drive, and visual effects such as transparent file folders.
"You have to go back, certainly, to Windows 95 to see something where we did a broad set of things that really enabled more types of applications," Gates said at the preview.
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