As Microsoft approaches a major milestone in the development of Longhorn, company executives are talking more about the features of the Windows XP successor, which they say will be easier to use, more secure, and less costly to manage than earlier versions of Windows.
Microsoft unveiled the Longhorn operating system in late 2003 at a conference for developers but then reigned in its ambitions for the operating system last year, aiming to make possible a release in late 2006.
To meet that shipment date, Microsoft clipped some of Longhorn's key features, most notably the unified storage system called WinFS that Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates had called the "Holy Grail."
Now, after several months of relative silence on the Longhorn front, Microsoft executives have once again started to talk up the operating system's features.
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